PARK SEO-BO ECRITURE
NOV 3 − DEC 22
NEW YORK
130, ORCHARD STREET, NEW YORK Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture No.090930, (detail) 2009. Mixed Media with Korean hanji paper on canvas. 130 × 195 cm | 51 3/16 × 76 3/4 in. Courtesy the Artist and Perrotin
NEW YORK NOV 3 - DEC 22 GREGOR HILDEBRANDT G. BELANGER & E.M. SMITH PARK SEO-BO
HONG KONG NOV 1 - DEC 1 JL. CERRILLO, J. DÁVILA, G. RICO, M. SOTO CLIMENT
Takashi Murakami, Untitled, 2018 (detail). Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame. 300 × 1500 cm | 118 1/8 × 590 9/16 in (15 panels). © 2018 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
PARIS OCT 13 - DEC 22 SOPHIE CALLE ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
SEOUL NOV 22 - DEC 30 JOSH SPERLING
TOKYO NOV 14 - DEC 15 BHARTI KHER SHANGHAI NOV 10 - JAN 5 TAKASHI MURAKAMI
SHANGHAI
TAKASHI MURAKAMI IN WONDERLAND NOV 10 − JAN 5
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG SPREADS
LONDON NOVEMBER – DECEMBER 2018 ROPAC.NET
LONDON PARIS SALZBURG ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, PALLADIAN XMAS (SPREAD) (DETAIL), 1980 SOLVENT TRANSFER, ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON WOODEN PANEL WITH MIRROR AND ELECTRIC LIGHT, 188,6 x 339,7 x 19,1 CM (74,25 x 133,75 x 7,5 IN) © ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION / ARS, NEW YORK / ADAGP, PARIS, 2018, PHOTO: GLENN STEIGELMAN
David Zwirner, in association with Fraenkel Gallery, is pleased to announce the exhibition Diane Arbus Untitled, November 2–December 15, 2018, at 537 West 20th Street, New York.
NEW YORK
Stanley Whitney In the Color
Lisa Yuskavage
November 8–December 15, 2018
Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985–2018 533 West 19th Street New Paintings
Home, 2018 (detail). Oil on linen, 80 × 80 inches (203.2 × 203.2 cm)
34 East 69th Street
David Zwirner New York
Mend e s Wood DM
Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66 th Street, 2 nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info@mendeswooddm.com
Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille Are Men Unicorns?
October 25 – December 21, 2018
ALMINE RECH GALLERY BRUSSELS
Silver landscape, eight multicolored, 2018,oil and silver on silkscreened canvas, 215 x 190 x 5 cm - 84 5/8 x 74 3/4 x 2 in
presents the 3rd edition of
SOUTH-SOUTH
BETWEEN LAND AND SEA An ongoing curatorial program exploring the complex notion of a connected ‘global south’
JOHANNESBURG
ERNESTO NETO
UM DIA TODOS FOMOS PEIXES (ONE DAY WE WERE ALL FISH) 22 November - 22 December
CAPE TOWN
ALFREDO JAAR MEN WHO CANNOT CRY 13 December - 12 January
FILM PROGRAMME Curated by Paula Borghi
CELEBRATING 10 YEARS UNDER THE DIRECTORSHIP OF LIZA ESSERS
www.goodman-gallery.com
Julia Scher Wonderland December 14, 2018 – February 2, 2019
Potsdamer Strasse 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com
LAWS OF MOTION
Jeff Wall, Siphoning Fuel, 2008
Josh Kline, Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, Jeff Wall, Anicka Yi
Gagosian November 20–December 21, 2018 Hong Kong January 14–March 9, 2019 San Francisco
ArtReview vol 70 no 8 November 2018
Hinges In the introduction to ArtReview’s first Power 100 (flashback to the groovy post1990s ArtReview office, fresh from surviving the Y2K bug) the editor (who dat?) breathlessly spoke of the artworld ‘jockeying’ for power. ArtReview is not here to argue that there is any less jockeying 17 years later (ArtReview has been to the bar at an art fair). It’s just that there is more than one race to jockey in. Or to put it another way, the idea of the ‘artworld’ – singular – is now an archaic one. Of course there are still hubs in which a lot of the business of art – that is, the making and showing, as well as the selling, of it – is done (as ArtReview said, we’ve been to the bar at an art fair), but it is no longer exclusively European and North American, nor are the jockeys all male and white (as the vast majority of them were, apparently, in 2002). Nor do these new centres of art activity define their success – or power – by the patronage of Europe and North America, the white and the male. Of course this decentralisation makes compiling a homogeneous single list tricky. ArtReview is not looking for sympathy, however. As much as the list accommodates many differing viewpoints as a whole, it is also a construction of many different viewpoints, namely a panel of 30 people from around the world who are invited to suggest the individuals and organisations that are having the most influence on the type of art being produced and (as importantly) exhibited
One thing
17
in their geographic locales. The hard work and hard debating, then, comes as ArtReview assimilates these propositions and differing, decentred geographical perspectives into a final list. Art of course is a liquid asset (again, we’re not talking just about the economics here… or the bar at the art fair) that still floats fairly freely around the world (in a way that many increasingly unhinged governments want to stop people doing – unless the art is being used as a cover for money laundering, in which case that’s not unhinged, but fair enough); the trick with the artist making work in a decentred locale is to make work that is both of that locale and that speaks to those beyond it: as many of the artists on this list, and the curators who work with them, and their buyers, sellers and patrons, manage with aplomb. The artworld(s) have become fractured, diverse places – though there’s still work to make them more so – and those on the Power 100 often make for strange bedfellows. Yet ArtReview would venture that they share a belief in power: art’s, it hopes, not their own. ArtReview
leads to another
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Robert Whitman 61
October 26 – December 21, 2018 510 West 25th Street ACCOMPANYING PERFORMANCE
Seoul – New York: Kids Exchange November 30 – December 2, 2018 Culture Hub 47 Great Jones Street
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BRIDGET RILEY PAINTING NOW NOVEMBER – JANUARY 2019
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RYAN TRECARTIN RE’SEARCH WAIT’S NOVEMBER – JANUARY 2019
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WALTON FORD Barbary
509 West 27th Street UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018
BRANCUSI & DUCHAMP The Art of Dialogue
515 West 27th Street UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018
Works From The Collection of
JOHN ASHBERY 297 Tenth Avenue UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018
JOEL SHAPIRO Kasmin Sculpture Garden, on view from The High Line at 27th Street UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018
STUART DAVIS
Lines Thicken: Stuart Davis in Black & White 293 Tenth Avenue UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018
The Stedelijk Museum is supported by:
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November 3 2018
http：//www.ocat-xian.org.cn
Years 周年 2013 2018
Xi an 西安
Gwobr ac Arddangosfa Gelf Ryngwladol International Art Exhibition and Prize
Anna Boghiguian Bouchra Khalili Otobong Nkanga Trevor Paglen Apichatpong Weerasethakul
#ArtesMundi8
26.10.2018 – 24.02.2019 Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd / National Museum Cardiff
Art Previewed
Previews by Martin Herbert 47
The Year in Money, Triumphs, Controversies and Protests 67
Lonnie Holley Interview by Ross Simonini 56
Interviews on Power with Simon Njami, Ekaterina Degot, James Bridle 74
page 48  Zheng Bo, Pteridophilia 2 (still), 2018, single-channel video, colour, sound, 20 min. Courtesy the artist. On view at the Taipei Biennial
November 2018
37
Power 100
Introduction 104
Venture Galleries by Jonathan T.D. Neil 140
The Power 100 with artworks by Kara Walker 108
In Memoriam 146
page 104 Kara Walker, Notes Drawn by a Negress After a Long Absence (detail), 2016, 62 drawings, gouache, ink and graphite on paper. © the artist. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co and Sprüth Magers
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ArtReview
ED RUSCHA That Was Then, This Is Now, 1989
Contemporary Art Evening AUCTION NEW YORK 14 NOVEMBER
EXHIBITION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 2–14 NOVEMBER 1334 YORK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10021 ENQUIRIES +1 212 606 7254 SOTHEBYS.COM/CONTEMPORARYEVENING #SOTHEBYSCONTEMPORARY © ED RUSCHA. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GAGOSIAN
DOWNLOAD SOTHEBY’S APP FOLLOW US @SOTHEBYS
Zhang Kechun, A Buddha Head In a Coalfield, Ningxia, Yellow River Series, 2014. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Curator Wu Hung
张克纯,《煤厂里的佛像, 宁夏》,「北流活活」系列, 2014 由三影堂摄影艺术中心提供
策展人 巫 鸿
ocat.org.cn
2018 9.15–12.9
设计: 杨坚 Designed by Yang Jian
深圳市南山区 华侨城创意文化园南区 F2栋 OCAT深圳馆 A 展厅、B 展厅
Exhibition halls A and B, OCAT Shenzhen, OCT Loft Nanshan, Shenzhen, China 开放时间 Opening hours 周二至周日 主办 Organizer
协办 Co-organizer
特别鸣谢 Special thanks to
支持 Supported by
ocat.org.cn
V&A South Kensington #vamphotography vam.ac.uk FREE The Photography Centre is supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation, Modern Media, Shao Zhong Art Foundation and many other generous donors. Linda McCartney (1941–98) Jimi Hendrix. Bromide print, 1968, printed later. Given by Sir Paul McCartney Š 1968 Paul McCartney / Photographer: Linda McCartney
Art Previewed
That live an ordinary life In an ordinary house In an ordinary street 45
Previewed and plays out with ‘the continued impact of Once upon a time there was mainstream art outlier practices on contemporary art’. Included, and ‘outsider’ art, two wholly separate worlds. 1 But Outliers and American Vanguard Art – the alongside the above-mentioned, are stars of the margin such as Martín Ramírez, Henry Darger fruit of years of research on the part of Lynne and Lonnie Holley (interviewed elsewhere in Cooke, curator at the National Gallery of Art this issue), and artworld luminaries including in Washington, where this show originated – tells another story. Limiting its scope to the US Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman and Matt Mullican. 2 and substituting ‘outsider’ for one of Malcolm Rochelle Feinstein was herself an outlier Gladwell’s buzzwords, Outliers… uses some of sorts for much of the last four decades, 250 works by 80 artists to evidence how avantdespite spending a quarter-century teaching gardists were consciously informed by self-taught painting and printmaking at Yale. Over the figures like Morton Bartlett, James Castle, Greer last few years, though, her richly flexible art Lankton et al. It’s structured in three parts: and influence on younger painters has been looking first at early American Modernism, recognised, and she’s enjoyed a touring the show segues into the 1960s interplay of retrospective in Europe. Now it’s her home eccentric outliers and cadres such as the Chicago country’s turn to wave the palm fronds. Imagists and West Coast assemblage artists, Feinstein is predominantly an abstractionist,
but her art is the inverse of hermetic or formally purist. It often incorporates photographs and overspills of scrawled language –reflecting the ubiquity of textual communication in everyday life – and often touches on the real world more widely. The series A Catalog of The Estate of Rochelle F. – Paintings 2009–2010 (2010), a fauxposthumous estate tabulated through raw, text-splattered black-and-white collages, seems to anatomise the artist’s effects in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; a radiant, rainbowhued, gauzy abstract from 2012–13 is titled In Anticipation of Women’s History Month. A 1990–97 series, The Wonderfuls, deliberately overuses the word ‘wonderful’ until it empties out (Wonderful Sex, Wonderful Vacation, etc), yet it’s an epithet frequently applicable to her work.
2 Rochelle Feinstein, Here Here, 2003, acrylic, Cibachrome on canvas, 152 × 117 cm. Courtesy the artist and Francesca Pia, Zürich
1 Barbara Rossi, Rose Rock, 1972, acrylic on Plexiglas panel with artist’s frame, 70 × 60 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago
November 2018
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Taking a hard left from wonderfulness, a UN the exhibition as a constantly morphing ecoreport on climate change (just published at the system of its own. In terms of participants – 41 of them, from 19 countries – artists will mingle time of writing) is arguing that there is a dire with NGOs, activists, filmmakers and more, need to reduce carbon emissions by 45 percent and include Julian Charrière, Ursula Biemann, should we not wish the planet to become a living Hsiao Sheng-Chien, Jumana Manna, Kuroshio hell by 2040. Governments are shrugging their Ocean Education Foundation and the Thousand shoulders; the US is adopting an ‘it’s too late, so Miles Trail Association. And, presumably, let’s do nothing’ approach. So it is not inappronobody is arriving by plane. (A carbon-neutral 3 priate or untimely that the 11th Taipei Biennial biennale, there’s a proposal.) – curated by Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda, In recent works by the US-based Mexican held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and subtitled Post-Nature – A Museum as an Ecosystem – is 4 painter Felipe Baeza – a 2018 Yale graduate styling itself as ‘a platform for multi-disciplinary whose degree show impressed Maureen Paley discussions of ecology’, and aims to ‘shed light enough that she’s now representing him – treelike forms sprout from the mouths of figures on environmental issues through international who themselves appear emerging from black artists’ perspectives’. For exhibition spaces, read ‘eco-labs’ that will change as the show goes on, waves or perhaps soil, or lie prone on their backs,
choked or supported (again, it’s not entirely clear) by midnight-blue figures. If there’s a lot of equivocating in that sentence, it’s because so much in Baeza’s art is pointedly between: not even entirely painting, factoring in as it does printmaking and collage elements including twine, cut paper and glitter. For the artist, who draws on his own experiences as well as techno outsiders Drexciya’s Afrofuturist mythmaking, these are depictions of what he calls a ‘migrant fugitive body’, both dislocated from home and queer. The body here is fragmented on both formal and metaphorical levels, and the paintings tend to be set at night, ‘where transformation happens’. If there is an agonistic aspect to Baeza’s work, then, it’s counterbalanced by a hopefulness concerning moving past rigid
3 Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean (still), 2018, video, colour, sound, 19 min. Courtesy the artist
4 Felipe Baeza, my vision is small fixed to what can be heard between the ears the spot between the eyes a well-spring opening to el mundo grande, 2018, ink, graphite, twine, cut paper, glitter and egg tempera on paper, 222 × 229 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London
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6 Tacita Dean, Antigone (detail), 2018, two synchronised 35mm colour anamorphic films, optical sound, 60 min (loop). © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London
5 Tris Vonna-Michell, Chopin (still), 2018. Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels
identities. The paintings have the graphic Chopin and the late concrete poet’s connection to his own family (Vonna-Michell asked his father velocity of, say, Leon Golub, with a dash of why he, Tris, was born in Essex; his father told Francesco Clemente’s skewed dreaminess, but their hopefulness about art’s emancipatory him to find Chopin). And it appears he still is, potentials is Baeza’s own. One to watch. given that a recent film is titled Chopin (2018) Tris Vonna-Michell has also, since the and will likely appear in his new show, Walking 5 middle of the last decade, drawn on his own life Sonic Texts – Sound Poetry and Movement in Space. story, if slantwise. His blend of slide projection, Such is the obsessive impetus underlining film, rapid-fire lecture-performance performed Vonna-Michell’s art, though, that it’s hard to to an egg-timer, and photographic stills has see how he could have operated any other way. The art of Tacita Dean was an act of functioned as an extended, ever-augmenting 6 compound preservation long before she began quest for the understanding of his own biography, involving shaggy-dog-like stories in which campaigning, in 2011, for the perpetuation of Vonna-Michell tries to track down crucial (to him) photochemical film. From her chalk drawings bits of information. His career has been a weird to her sumptuous, elegiac films, her art has conone thus far because he’s generally stuck to this cerned itself with what time washes away, and storyline. Early on, he was fascinated by Henri what might conceivably stay. At Bregenz, that’s
November 2018
summarised by three films: the six-part Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS… (2008), the sincedeceased choreographer’s willed immobility to a ‘soundtrack’ of John Cage’s 4’ 33” (1952); Dean’s 2011 Turbine Hall commission FILM, all silence, sprocket-holes and scratches as a welter of discontinuous analogue imagery sweeps by; and her recent, long-gestating, hourlong odyssey Antigone (2018), with its mix of Anne Carson poetry, American and English landscape, and bearded actor Stephen Dillane as Oedipus. Two monumental chalkboard drawings, The Montafon Letter (2017) and Chalk Fall (2018), round out the show, respectively depicting a mountain landscape and chalk cliff – the latter, inevitably, collapsing. Two years ago, for an exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery in London, and following
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7 Maria Eichhorn, 72 Paintings, 1992–93, 72 monochrome painted canvases, name tags, labelling on the reverse side of the canvases, 123 × 93 cm (each). Courtesy Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich
9 Martin Beck, Dans un second temps, 2018 (installation view, 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz). Photo: Fred Dott. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York. 8 Gabriel Lester, Bambaataa, 2018 (installation view, The Hague). Photo: Eveline van Egdom. Courtesy Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, and Stroom, The Hague
a site visit and discussion with the gallery and social space. If there doesn’t end up being my ongoing research into suggested realities 7 workers the previous year, Maria Eichhorn much to look at, the content – as with a closed and unresolved narratives… an exhibition in elected to ‘exhibit’ the closure of the gallery gallery whose workers have withdrawn their flux to flex the mind’. Among those fluxing for five weeks. Back in 2002, for Documenta 11, labour – is the invisible, but very real, people elements will be a series of petrified plants, she set up a public limited company whose sole without which it couldn’t exist. slumped but apparently growing again in the shareholder was the company itself, and for Gabriel Lester has been a graffiti artist, direction of a light source; prints of faces whose 8 which the capital invested couldn’t increase in MC, director and writer as well as a longstanding profiles are made from fine chains that move in value; the same year, she spent her exhibition artist of note (this is the Amsterdam-based response to loudspeakers; and large sculptures Lester’s seventh show at Fons Welters). Plus since budget for a show at the Kunsthalle Bern on featuring a face on one side and geometry on 2013 he’s co-run a design studio, PolyLester. (apparently much-needed) repairs to the buildthe other, as if a crystallisation of thought. A What’s been consistent for some time is the ing itself. The reductive but potent gesture is recent one of these was called Bambaataa (2018); desire to create environments – a sort of her specialty, and accordingly at the Migros, for Lester, evidently, the hip hop don’t stop. for a survey of her work over 30 years, she’s chosen expanded cinema – where narratives can arise. 9 Club culture also infuses Martin Beck’s Last only 12 works, including 72 Pictures (1992–93), This show, Shake a Face, engages with tropism, Night (2016), a 13-hour video in which each of the 72 monochrome panels painted by 43 people or the notion that lifeforms and attitudes are 118 songs played by David Mancuso at the last during a show in Paris: anyone could sign up moulded by environments. According to Lester night of the long-running New York dance party and paint, the museum turned into both studio – contacted mid-preparation – it will ‘continue The Loft is replayed in sequence on a domestic
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ArtReview
turntable, a tender durational tribute to a has apparently occupied his time by producing long-ago mini-utopia. The Vienna- and New one US letter-size ‘document’ per day– saying, York-based Beck’s work, though, can make that in a recent interview, that he finds writing a timescale look short. Recent works here include ‘painfully slow process’ – we doubt he knocked rocks whose clasts have refused to cohere over these out in a morning. millennia, though they sit together, remaining Circulation is probably the key metaphor big pebbly clusters – a clue that, as in the Loft underpinning contemporary art of the last parties that temporarily brought together decade or two: think networked painting and different communities, Beck is interested in indeed all art that reflects the rhizomatic model temporary social unities. And indeed, his diof the Internet; think too of how our world is defined by, as Bergen Kunsthall puts it in describverse shows themselves – stylistically polyglot – enact something similar on the formal level, 10 ing their 12-artist group show On Circulation, ‘flows of capital, networks of people and inwith this one also including a video based on formation that connect distant parts of the a Canova marble sculpture; and a group of world and various levels of social productivity’. 24 text drawings. Since, in recent years, Beck
The curating is gratifyingly off-beam (eg no Seth Price, no Michael Krebber), the work on show stretching from Swedish painter Ulla Wiggen’s luscious realist 1960s images of circuit boards to Nina Canell’s works involving dinky microchips and sliced cucumbers, to Park MacArthur following the progress of a piece of marble from a Norwegian quarry to an American museum. The show itself, the organisers note, is a ‘network’ of approaches, rather than a single-pointed thesis, which is fair enough since maybe a viewer doesn’t need to be told what circulation means in 2018. To quote some old Palmolive commercials, “you’re soaking in it”. Martin Herbert
10 Ulla Wiggen, Sändare, 1968, acrylic on canvas, 45 × 100 cm. Courtesy Moderna Museet, Stockholm
1 Outliers and American Vanguard Art LACMA, Los Angeles 18 November – 17 March
4 Felipe Baeza Maureen Paley, London 17 November – 6 January
8 Gabriel Lester Fons Welters, Amsterdam 23 November – 12 January
2 Rochelle Feinstein Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York through 3 March
5 Tris Vonna-Michell Jan Mot, Brussels through 1 December
9 Martin Beck 47 Canal, New York 14 November – 13 January
3 Taipei Biennial Taipei Fine Arts Museum 17 November – 10 March
6 Tacita Dean Kunsthaus Bregenz through 6 January
10 On Circulation Bergen Kunsthall 16 November – 13 January
7 Maria Eichhorn Migros Museum, Zürich 20 November – 3 February
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ArtReview
ROYAL DRAWING SCHOOL EXHIBITION 9 –14 November at Christie’s, King Street A selling exhibition of drawings and works on paper by postgraduate students. Expanded exhibition continues 28 Nov–16 Jan 2019 at Royal Drawing School, Shoreditch, ec2a 3sg.
The Royal Drawing School runs a postgraduate, foundation and young artist programme. Daytime and evening public courses run throughout the year.
www.royaldrawingschool.org
Drawing by Sara Anstis
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Evening Standard
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26 Sep 2018 – 6 Jan 2019
Members go free. Richard Wilson, 20:50, 1987. Installation view Hayward Gallery, London, 2018. © and courtesy the artist. Photo: Mark Blower.
Interview
Lonnie Holley by Ross Simonini
“I take things and I put them together, and they end up being what humans call art” 56
ArtReview
As he tells it, Lonnie Holley began singing at birth, fathered his first child at fifteen and discovered art at twenty-nine. He was raised “down by the river” in Birmingham, Alabama, and his life story has the weight of legend. He’s the seventh of 27 children and now has 15 children of his own, by five different women. For Holley, making art is his way to therapeutically address the traumas occasioned by an intense life. Whether or not his stories are precisely true, it’s clear that his early life was dense with struggle. He was incarcerated in a juvenile detention centre. A severe car accident left him briefly braindead. He dug graves for a living. As a visual artist, Holley mostly works with found materials, especially those coated in the patina of time. He’s drawn to tree branches, broken electronics, ragged fabric, rusty tools and plastic packaging – junk, as he calls it. “I take things and I put them together,” he says, “and they end up being what humans call art.” In his Atlanta apartment-studio, these assemblages dangle from an environment of thread and wire, and in his former home in Alabama – demolished by the city for new development – they filled the front yard like a visionary environment. On their own, the individual sculptures are talismanic, but in these studio installations they evoke a neural network of compulsive creativity. A few years into his object-making, Holley was brought under the aegis of art historian and collector Bill Arnett. Years later, in 2010, Arnett would cofound (with his sons) the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which documents and preserves the tradition of African-American Southern artists, such as Thornton Dial and the Gee’s Bend quilters. Holley is self-taught (his formal education stopped at seventh grade), and his work certainly expresses the raw aesthetic of the outsider artists in Souls Grown Deep; but his objects also sit nicely alongside the work of Jimmy Durham, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed and Nancy Kienholz. Sometimes Holley joins his abstract approach with figuration, which usually takes the form of a face in profile, handbent into shape with modest wire. The Branch that I Grew Up With (2014), for example, uses an oak limb, human hair, corn silk, heater core, TV transformers, pig iron and coconut-shaving wires to depict a mind bound and weighted by chaos. For most of his life, Holley’s work was known only regionally: in 2004, the Birmingham Museum of Art held a 25-year survey of his work, entitled Do We Think Too Much? I Don’t Think We Can Ever Stop. Five years ago, Holley began working with James Fuentes Gallery in New York, and has since held multiple solo shows and appeared in group shows alongside established contemporary artists. Nevertheless, earlier this year he was featured in a definitive
‘outsider’ exhibition, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, Holley began releasing his music, which has come out in three increasingly ambitious albums: Just Before Music (2012), Keeping a Record of It (2013) and MITH (2018). He’s toured and collaborated with a variety of younger musicians, including Bill Callahan and members of Deerhunter and Animal Collective. His music is often improvised, and his songs are improvisations not meant to be recreated. MITH pushes his psychedelic soul poems into more political directions and colours his classic melodies with bold, rich production. At sixty-eight, Holley continues to work and tour at a constant clip. In person he has the joyful energy of a child, hungry for experience, fascinated by the world. I spent the day with Holley in New York and we spoke for several hours, but the encounter was less like a backand-forth interview and more like a sermon,
“I went down the ditch with my little fork and my little bucket, and dug for worms. It was an adventure ’cause all of these little worms you be trying to catch are on the run. Every time you expose them, they run. I put some humans in the action of a worm, because as soon as they’re exposed, they go running” with occasional interruptions by me. His preaching was musical. He dropped quotes from the Bible and his own lyrics, and made near-constant observations on the minutiae around him. Initially we met in my studio for the talk, and we both discussed our work at length. Then we strolled through Chelsea with my wife and Matt Arnett, who is Bill’s son and works with Holley through Souls Grown Deep. Holley was uninterested in the galleries and mostly stayed outside, wandering the streets, head down, hunting for urban treasure. By the end of the day, he’d fashioned a hanging charm from zip ties and a railroad spike, which he gave to me and now hangs in my home. The following month, I received a text from Holley with a picture of a new sculpture facing page Lonnie Holley. Photo: Timothy Duffy for JagJaguwar
November 2018
he had made for me. He’d left it on the streets of Manhattan, and gave the address where it was located. A few hours later I went to find it, but by the time I arrived, the busy flow of urban life had already washed it away. Ross Simonini I’ve noticed some welding in your recent show at James Fuentes [The Weight of Everything, 2017]. This seems a radically different process than the homemade objects you’ve made in the past. Lonnie Holley I didn’t actually weld the pieces. I was at a hundred-year-old junkyard, so the policies were that the artist that comes in can’t use the torches and the welding machines on the site, so you have helpers. But I’m kind of independent when it comes down to doing things. I prefer to do it myself. At times that help is really necessary, though. It’s like you and me today, talking, but we’re not just sitting here talking. We got this machine that is recording, therefore we have our helper that is helping to deliver the conversation out to others. The process of that is so much more: you got to look at the kilowatt, the power that these machines need, you got to look at the making of the machine itself. We as humans, we have a tendency to do things, but we’re not seeing the overall outcome of it. That’s our greatest mistake. In the Bible, it says, ‘Study to shew thyself approved’. With my action as an artist and a musician, I’m still learning. When you invite me to come talk, I’m talking about the experience that I’ve experienced, and that may go all the way back to the smallest little run of solder that melts these lines together, that allows the technical ability of this technical machine to work. So in a sense, I don’t want nobody to try to brain it like I do. In a sense, we need to learn what our brains can do, but I’m not here to force nobody to appreciate the whole level, the whole concept, of everything. I’m on the other side of the pulpit. I’m not behind it. I’m not looking to make myself presentable to an audience every Sunday. My kind of presentation is for 60-6024-7. Sixty seconds, sixty minutes, twenty-four hours. You see what I’m saying? The Bible also says to watch as well as pray. The term of that, to me, was to look at other people’s habits as well as communicate. Praying is like pleading, asking for something, asking for attention from someone. If we put it in a spiritual realm, it’s a god. We put it in the realm of the holy one, the high thinker, the intelligent one. But also: mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, uncle, auntie. Relatives with the ability to teach me something. Praising means to put you in a memorial position: I’m thankful for you, therefore I dedicate the movements of myself, my capabilities, all I do. I want to make
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everybody that has served me proud of what I do. I want to show my capabilities, I want to show my performance, but I want to be the best at what I do. I want to show them I worked all these years. I worked since 1979 in art. I want to be one of America’s greatest artists. I want to be always on the job, always! RS What does “always on the job” mean to you? LH Always on the job is me walking down the street and seeing all the trash on the street and wondering where will it go? Or seeing all the leaves that’s falling off the trees that blew along without being raked up. Or going underground, and looking up, and down, and looking around at the steel beams, and thinking, ‘Do people really understand the deterioration of a piece of iron when somebody says it’s rusting to pieces? It’s rusting to pieces because of the dampness that’s down in the ground anyway. You got granulated grains scratching against whatever surface keeps the tunnel from collapsing. How many grains of sand could go through a needle, but they say that a rich man cannot enter into heaven because he could not fit through the eye of a needle? Does that mean that the grain of sand could get into heaven before we as humans can? Yes it can. Yes it can! A grain of sand could be picked up with the wind and blown along with a storm. If the heavens is no higher than
that much space off the Earth, and all that atmosphere between Earth and all the other planets, if Mother Universe is considered to be the container of the heavens, then who must we praise, if it’s not Mother Universe, you see? I say, thumbs up for Mother Universe and her gumboise manner! I love gumbo [stew]. I know what it takes to make a pot of gumbo. I know that you have to stay right there, and you have to continue to stir it as you add ingredients, and it won’t stick. It won’t burn. And as you add those ingredients, you can’t go churning it like milk. That’s not good, ’cause you mash everything. You want to stir it properly. Every bit of every thing in the action of the universe is in the process of stirlation. Everything has got a stirring order. If we just learn to appreciate it, and understand that our brains contain all of this information if we desire to have it. If we just sit and think, we wouldn’t try to push ourselves beyond the current of reality. Sometimes we overdo ourselves. We kill ourselves too quick. We put too much force on something that has a force container of its own. All these energy drinks and things like that people’s drinking, they don’t need them. They’s taking themselves away from the natural. They can’t love themselves in the natural. When you’ve energised yourself, your brain has gone too fast to even recognise your body. You’re constantly putting
The Weight of Everything, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy James Fuentes Gallery, New York
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on makeup. You’re tearing at your body, trying to make it the finest, when it was integral of the finest just by the process of natural growth. I wish I could have kept it all. I wish I could’ve. RS You speak like a true improviser. LH Do you not see that life is in the act of what you just said? Life don’t go around announcing the layout of the manner that it is. It creates the manner that it is. Therefore, we be within it. That leaves what? That leaves our brains to make the decisions of how to deal with it. It’s up to us. RS Do you feel like the music and the lyrics function the same way to you as talking to me right now? LH If you had asked me to come in here and sing it, I would sing it the same way. RS What did you listen to growing up? LH I was raised with the big band. I was raised up with [American bandleader] Lawrence Welk. I was raised up hearing instrumental music in the background of movies. I was raised up going through the state fairgrounds and hearing all the different kinds of musics and sounds and then coming to the point of seeing and centralising these different types of sound. So, we need it. We all need to take a course on hearing. I get so intense in my hearing that I can hear the crawling things. I can hear things walking
The Boneheaded Serpent at the Cross (It Wasn’t Luck), 1996, found metal, bones, dried flowers, 53 × 46 × 23 cm. Courtesy Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta
November 2018
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The Weight of Everything, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy James Fuentes Gallery, New York
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and stepping and breaking leaves and sticks as they step on the ground. RS Were you raised with religion? LH My grandmother didn’t force me to stay in church with her, but she took me there. Therefore she took me somewhere to learn of a manner. She also took me to the graveyard when she dug graves. She took me there and I watched her manner. I also watched her at her house, almost at the ending of her life. I remember one cold day I had when I was at my mawmaw’s house, my grandmother, my daddy’s mother, and she was in her room, and she was laying there looking out the window. Then, the next morning, she had got up. She had this one little fireplace in her room. One little kind of gas heater. I watched her. She got it. She made a rack with some bricks right in front of the little gas heater. The flame was coming up just like that. So she made a rack, she set the skillet up there and then she fixed me breakfast right in that skillet. I never forgot that. Something had happened to her house and she had to do without the kitchen appliances and everything. So she took me out in the backyard, and she took some bricks, she took a sheet of tin, she took it in the house and she washed it real good, smooth. She brought it back out and she took the grease and she greased the tin. She did the pancakes. She did the eggs. She did the meat. Those were considered to be primitive acts of survival, but don’t we need them now, when the people’s houses and things get burned now? I’m so afraid of what fires have done and the aftermath of fires, the animals and the creatures, all those things trying to run away from fire. And animals that was underneath found their burrows and got up underneath the rock and survived still had to come out and try to move around on top of this heated situation. Can you imagine what that was like? Little bird’s feet and toes just cooked off! They running around on the nub of their legs just trying to get to freedom. These are things that we cannot see and we don’t want to see because we call them horrible. We don’t want to deal with horror, but we pay for horror films. We want the fantasy of the horror, but when it comes down to natural horror, we don’t want to face it. My whole thing is, why not, if we’re to change it?
On the way down here, I was hearing this man, right there before we stopped at the station to get off to come to your house. It was a man sitting playing his keyboard. It was Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come. It’s almost like his spirit was connected, and as he was coming to the end of it, he smiled. A change is going to come. It’s not here all the way, because it never stops changing. I know that I’ll probably be dead and gone when the change comes. You can say it now and it’ll take 30 years before it’ll be activated into the system. You see what I’m talking about? I try to tell people, beware,
and be wise, and in the process we will attain wisdom. We will become the wisdom keeper and pass on the wisdom. RS Do you feel like that’s the role of art? The communication of wisdom? LH Say you got a place that is prone to be dangerous, I believe all you gotta do is have a few concerts in that place. And have different concerts, don’t try to just have one, because everyone is The Weight of Everything, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy James Fuentes Gallery, New York
November 2018
different, and their hearing is different, so they don’t just need one type of music brought to them. All kinds of communication. RS Do you talk with most people the way you’re talking to me now? LH No. I can’t just set out in my hood and talk to everybody like I’m talking to you. Everybody can’t – is not even worthy to hear what I’m saying because they’re not going to do anything with it, so why waste my breath and time saying things? RS What kind of energy does it take for you to show your work in public? In the artworld? LH A lot of these peoples, they go to museums, and they get involved with shows and things, but they actually don’t get it. They don’t give themselves enough time to get it. They really don’t put enough time in investigating the piece of art that is brought before them, especially if the piece of art is rare and different and for a specific cause. If you’re not examining it, you won’t get its message. And that’s why they miss a lot, they miss artists such as you and me. They’re misinterpreting our work. They’ll put it in the realm of, ‘Oh, he’s abstract. Oh, he’s using that junk, that trash, that garbage. That stuff, that’s rotted wood, that’s rusted tin. I know about that stuff.’ Not really. You don’t know about that stuff. And you don’t know the term ‘I was born down by the river’. I was born down in the country! I was put out in the midst of life as it were in the fullness of itself. I was taken away from my momma at one and a half, I was sold into a whiskey house at four years old, and I had to grow there. I had to get out of the house at five years old because of the grown people’s conversation and all this other kind of stuff. I went down the ditch with my little fork and my little bucket, and dug for worms. It was an adventure ’cause all of these little worms you be trying to catch are on the run. Every time you expose them, they run. I put some humans in the action of a worm, because as soon as they’re exposed, they go running. They don’t want people to know them like that. We’re running from the atmosphere. We don’t want to get sunburned. We don’t go out and deal with the cold. We stay in. We turn up our furnace. Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California
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2017–18 The Year in Money, Triumphs, Controversies and Protests
Where the people that you meet Are ordinary 67
October 2017 9 Oct After Nicole Eisenman’s work for Skulptur Projekte Münster is vandalised with fascist slogans for the second time, local residents launch a fundraising campaign to keep the work permanently in the German city The Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing is sold to a group of Chinese investors led by Jason Jiang, the billionaire behind Focus Media, almost a year after its founders, Guy and Miriam Ullens, placed it on the market. Director Philip Tinari retains his position
2 Oct The Louvre withdraws a largescale sculpture by Atelier van Lieshout set to be unveiled in the Jardin des Tuileries as part of fiac art fair. The sculpture-architecture hybrid, Domestikator, resembling a man having sex with a quadruped, first shown in Germany in 2015, was deemed too explicit for the French public. On 18 October the work is unveiled at the Centre Pompidou Protests and counterprotests erupt outside the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo following a nude performance by artist Wagner Schwartz. The rightwing political group Movimento Brasil Livre accuses the museum of promoting paedophilia. Schwartz flees the country after receiving death threats
6 Oct Citing a lack of funds, artist Marina Abramović scraps plans to open a $31m Upstate New York facility for the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (mai)
in light o 4 Oct Kara Walker receives Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contributions to African and African-American culture The Whitney Museum reveals the design of a largescale artwork by David Hammons that it proposes to install in Hudson River Park. The sculpture mimics the skeleton of Pier 52 (announced 19 September)
11 Oct Kader Attia wins €70,000 Joan Miró Prize
the museum recognises the issue needs addressing 8 Oct Activist collective Decolonize This Place organise an ‘anti-Columbus Day’ tour of the American Museum of Natural History, New York. The group demands that Columbus Day be renamed ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ and calls for the removal of the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the entrance of the museum. The museum says it recognises that the issue needs addressing
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Money
Triumphs
Controversies
Protests
17 Oct Stedelijk Museum director Beatrix Ruf steps down after Dutch media allege ‘conflicts of interest’ between her institutional role and her ancillary work as an art adviser. In June 2018 an independent investigation commissioned by Amsterdam city council criticises the museum’s supervisory board and clears Ruf of any wrongdoing
18 Oct Activist and arts patron Osman Kavala is detained by antiterrorism police at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport amid an ongoing civil rights crackdown by the Turkish government following the failed military coup of July 2016. The same week, a nationalist group destroys a nude sculpture by Ron Mueck during an attack on an Istanbul exhibition of contemporary art from the collection of businessman Ömer Koç
19 Oct Hundreds of arts professionals pen an open letter denouncing a climate of ‘hate, intolerance, and violence against free expression’ in Brazil. The letter condemns rising rightwing activism in the country and the consequent censorship of exhibitions and plays
25 Oct Knight Landesman, copublisher of art magazine Artforum, resigns following allegations of sexual misconduct by former employee Amanda Schmitt. In the fallout it is alleged Landesman sexually harassed at least nine women over almost a decade, with testimonies emerging across social media. Michelle Kuo, Artforum’s editor, tenders her resignation, stating: ‘In light of the troubling allegations [against Knight Landesman] I could no longer serve as a public representative of Artforum’. The revelations come in the wake of sexual-abuse allegations against cinema producer Harvey Weinstein, which triggered similar allegations against powerful men around the world, often using the hashtag #MeToo
of troubling allegations
#not surprised 28 Oct The British Museum and Abu Dhabi’s Zayed National Museum terminate a cooperation deal, which would have seen a new museum on Saadiyat Island, two years before the ten-year contract was due to end. The museum was originally slated to open in 2013 but construction work had yet to begin Seventy protesters gather in front of James Cohan Gallery’s Chinatown location to ‘say goodbye to Omer Fast’s racist show’. The protesters accuse Fast, who transformed the gallery to resemble a decrepit Chinese storefront, of maintaining ‘racist narratives of uncleanliness, otherness and blight that have historically been projected onto Chinatown’, with grievances quickly morphing into broader issues of gentrification
30 Oct An open letter denouncing sexual harassment in the artworld is written by 150 artists, curators, museum directors, writers, gallerists and other professionals from the field, and signed by more than 2,000. Titled ‘Not Surprised’, the letter emerges in the wake of the accusations against Artforum’s Knight Landesman, and states: ‘There is an urgent need to share our accounts of widespread sexism, unequal and inappropriate treatment, harassment and sexual misconduct, which we experience regularly, broadly, and acutely’
November 2018
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November
8 Nov Benjamin Genocchio leaves his post as executive director of the Armory Show after accusations of sexual harassment. Genocchio denies the allegations 9 Nov Rightwing activists in São Paulo picket a talk by Judith Butler given as part of a conference titled ‘The End of Democracy’. The protesters carry signs and banners protesting the theorist’s writing on abortion and her work in queer studies, and burn an effigy of Butler dressed as a witch
10 Nov The four shortlisted artists of the 2017 Preis der Nationalgalerie, the biggest art prize in Germany, issue an open letter criticising the award. Among the concerns of Sol Calero, Iman Issa, Jumana Manna and Agnieszka Polska was the ‘self-congratulatory use of diversity as a public-relations tool’ Antigentrification groups stage a protest at the opening of Laura Owens’s Whitney Museum retrospective, demanding the artist leave her studio and nonprofit art space 356 Mission Road, located in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighbourhood. Protesters accuse the artist, as well as fellow cofounders of the space, her dealer Gavin Brown and bookshop owner Wendy Yao, of being responsible for a wave of gallery gentrification in the area. On 30 March 2018, Owens closes 356 Mission Road
$450,0 11 Nov The Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu receives a special Academy Award for his first virtual-reality installation, carne y arena, which puts viewers in the shoes of migrants crossing the us–Mexico border. The work had been shown at lacma and Milan’s Fondazione Prada Louvre Abu Dhabi opens to the public on Saadiyat Island after repeated delays. The €10b project is designed by Jean Nouvel. On 9 November, two Swiss journalists reporting on the opening are detained while filming migrant workers in the town of Mussafah. They are released the evening of the inauguration after extensive questioning
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Money
Triumphs
Controversies
Protests
14 Nov In a blog for Hyperallergic, Coco Fusco writes about being sexually harassed by older men (including the late filmmaker Jean Rouch) in her twenties, and argues that the artworld and art schools are a ‘perfect place for sexual predators’ 17 Nov Bernardo Paz, the collector and founder of Brazil’s outdoor contemporary art museum Inhotim, is sentenced to nine years in jail for money laundering. In May a newspaper report claims that a business owned by the collector violated environmental law and used child labour in its charcoal production
18 Nov Gavin Delahunty, senior curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art, resigns over allegations of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ The 23,000 sqm Powerlong Art Museum opens in Qibao, Shanghai. It is backed by collector Xu Jiankang, whose holding company owns the Powerlong Group, and is focused on ink works and modern and contemporary Chinese art. This is the company’s second museum in China
000,000 15 Nov Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (c. 1500) sells for $450m at Christie’s New York, the highest sum an artwork has ever received at auction. The auction house billed the painting as ‘the greatest artistic rediscovery of the 21st Century’, though experts are not unanimous on its attribution Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Fund awards $22m to 30 arts organisations dedicated to fighting mass incarceration Cuauhtémoc Medina is named chief curator of the 2018 Shanghai Biennale
22 Nov Art collective Centre for Political Beauty erects a partial replica of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial outside the home of far-right AfD politician Björn Höcke, who sparked controversy when he urged Germany to stop atoning for Nazi guilt
23 Nov The European Commission tells the five British cities bidding to host the European Capital of Culture in 2023 that they are not eligible to compete for the title as a consequence of Brexit Li Ming, a member of the collective Double Fly Art Center, wins the biennial Hugo Boss Asia Prize and rmb 300,000 ($45,600) for his work as a solo artist
24 Nov Seven artists pull out of the inaugural Kuala Lumpur Biennale after authorities confiscate an artwork on the grounds that it featured ‘elements of communism’ 26 Nov The Venice Biennale closes its 57th edition, with record attendance by more than 615,000 people over six months
28 Nov The Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation launch the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative, jointly pledging $6m to support increased diversity with arts organisations
November 2018
30 Nov Staff at the Jewish Museum accuse curator Jens Hoffmann of sexual harassment. Following an investigation, the museum sacks Hoffmann. Multiple institutions and organisations working with Hoffmann, including the Kadist Foundation, where he was senior adviser, the Honolulu Biennial, whose 2019 edition Hoffmann was to curate, and Mousse magazine, where he was editor at large, go on to cut ties. Three editors of the Exhibitionist journal, which Hoffmann founded in 2009, resign
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December 1 Dec Over 120 artists and scholars pen an open letter calling for the removal of New York monuments they see as symbols of white supremacy. The signatories, who include Claire Bishop, Hal Foster and Fred Moten, suggest that removed statues be displayed in ‘dedicated museum spaces or memorial gardens’ and that their original sites be filled with newly commissioned art
6 Oct Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud is named as the mystery bidder who paid $450m for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. But two days later, Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism claims it is responsible for the acquisition of the painting, which will go on view at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. In September the planned unveiling of the artwork is postponed. No reason is given
2 Dec The Design Society, a new nonprofit institution cofounded by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and public company China Merchants Shekou, opens in Shenzhen’s Sea World Culture and Arts Center
We are still not surprised 9 Dec Artforum files a motion to dismiss a lawsuit by former employee Amanda Schmitt, who alleges that the magazine’s former publisher Knight Landesman sexually harassed her for years. The lawsuit named both Artforum and Landesman as defendants, and the magazine has clarified that its response was only on behalf of the magazine, citing its separation from Landesman. Campaign group We Are Not Surprised issues a public letter in support of Schmitt headlined ‘We are still not surprised’
12 Dec China lifts an 11-month ban on South Korean art. The embargo, which was not announced but became apparent when import licenses were applied for and rejected, came after a us antimissile system was installed in Seongju, South Korea. The ban led various institutions to cancel or postpone major shows by Korean artists, while artworks by Korean artists were notably absent from Shanghai’s main fairs
4 Dec Artist Jaishri Abichandani stages a #MeToo performance outside a retrospective of photographer Raghubir Singh at the Met Breuer. Abichandani says she was abused by Singh during the 1990s (the photographer died in 1999)
5 Dec New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announces it will not be removing Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming (1938) from its galleries. The painting became the target of an online petition, which stated, ‘In showcasing this work for the masses without providing any type of clarification, the Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children’
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13 Dec Seventy-four artists featured in Documenta 14 pen a letter protesting that the quinquennial exhibition has been ‘technocratically reduced’ to a ‘commercial enterprise’ by its supervisory board. The missive comes as Documenta ceo Annette Kulenkampff and artistic director Adam Szymczyk are subjected to intense scrutiny following an independent audit revealing the exhibition’s sizeable budgetary deficit. The open letter states that Documenta ‘must stay free from political interference in order to be able to add important voices to contemporary discourses and fulfill its mission of materializing artistic freedom’
Money 15 Dec French-Chinese artist Hu Jiamin and his wife are detained by Chinese authorities following the unveiling of Hu’s mural in tribute to the late Chinese dissident and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo at Shenzhen’s Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. The work is destroyed Ralph Rugoff is named curator of the 2019 Venice Biennale. In July Rugoff announces his edition will be titled May You Live in Interesting Times and will consider the role of art in response to the current political climate, especially in the context of fake news and ‘alternative facts’
Triumphs
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Protests
16 Dec Los Angeles’s Marc Foxx Gallery closes after 23 years in operation Artist Hua Yong is detained by Chinese authorities after documenting the destruction of migrant neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Beijing. He is released on bail two days later
significant conflict of interests 19 Dec Elisabeth Murdoch’s appointment to Arts Council England’s governing body is questioned. A letter from Artists’ Union England to the ace chair, Sir Nicholas Serota, claims Murdoch is ‘under-qualified and non-representative’, and that there was a ‘significant conflict of interests’ arising from Murdoch’s financial contributions via her philanthropic Freelands Foundation to Tate while it was under the leadership of Serota American artist Chuck Close faces accusations of sexual misconduct from several women who posed for the artist in his studio. The artist apologised, though he noted that ‘last time I looked, discomfort was not a major offense’. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, cancels an upcoming show by the artist. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia continues its exhibition of the artist, but installs a new show in adjacent galleries titled The Art World We Want, featuring works from its collection ‘that will catalyze conversations about power, gender, visibility, and voice’
13 Dec Canada announces that the collective Isuma will represent the country at the 2019 Venice Biennale, marking the first presentation of art by Inuit in the national pavilion. A few days later, Canada’s Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba receives a $10m grant from the municipal government to support plans to build a new Inuit art centre, dedicated to ‘Inuit who use art as a voice and language to celebrate their stories with the world’
Wilson Must Go 16 Dec Artists in the inaugural National Gallery of Victoria Triennial demand the termination of the museum’s contract with Wilson Security, which also manages services at Australia’s offshore detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru. Several artists, including Candice Breitz and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, retitle their artworks Wilson Must Go. In February 2018 the institution announces it’s dropping Wilson Security as its security contractor
November 2018
25 Dec Chinese human rights activist Wu Gan is found ‘guilty of subversion’ and sentenced to eight years in prison, the harshest sentence to be passed during the current government crackdown on activism. Wu helped organise demonstrations outside government offices to protest abuses of power
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Simon Njami “The old ‘centres’ are not what they used to be”
Founder of Revue Noire, curator of the influential Africa Remix (2004–07), cocurator of the first African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007), the writer and curator has long advocated the development of contemporary art in and from the African continent. Moreover he has been increasingly active in its emerging biennial culture, while supporting a new generation of young curators. Here he talks to ArtReview about art, power, postcolonialism, decentring and how the first step to overcoming exclusion is to stop thinking you exist on the margins.
contemporaneity and contemporary art in a genuine, or should I say, more organic manner. The narratives used by the artists are a more direct reflection of what surrounds them. AR Is artistic (self-)education and the development of critical knowledge a priority in the African scenes?
ArtReview How are the artistic preoccupations of artists shifting in the African scenes? Are national, traditional, regional forms changing? Simon Njami The major shift, in my opinion, is the deconstruction of notions of Africa, identity and so on. Artists have understood that, no matter where they come from, they have to offer bodies of work that take into account the complexity of identity today. It is no longer enough to claim to be African. The definition of identity not only reflects one’s origins but includes a way of looking at the world beyond regional borders. And this, of course, is influencing the production and the perception of what it means to be an artist today.
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AR What do you find most promising – in terms of content, or methodology – in the artistic practices taking shape now? SN Artists are no longer questioning the notion of identity in postcolonial terms. Instead of being busy trying to prove something to the ‘others’, they are focusing on developing a language of their own. It shows through a number of events (Lubumbashi and Kampala biennials) and initiatives (art centres in Lagos, Cairo, Cameroon) that are striving at reframing the notion of Simon Njami. Photo: Zacharie Ngnogue
ArtReview
SN It is paramount. How could one develop a work of any interest without a critical gaze? Writing is key. Africa has, for too long, been talked about as a passive subject. There is today a claim to voice different ideas and different experiences and not to be any more the tool of those who call themselves ‘specialists’. A real strategy is being shaped, in order for Africans to create their own language that would contradict the dominant one, no longer as a uniform group of people, but as individuals. AR Educating and training ‘future leaders’ has produced a number of significant curators working internationally. What are the potentials and the limits of their role in African scenes themselves? SN We can already see the results brought by this new generation of curators and intellectuals. They have understood the importance of ‘working at home’. Because no matter the success they might encounter abroad, they need to fuel their reflection with what is happening on the continent. The limits, for some of them, will be
to mistake the real ‘game’ and think that whatever power they have achieved is coming from outside. Those who are going to bring major changes need a certain level of legitimacy that can only be acquired by a greater knowledge of what is at stake in order to become the spokespeople of the new generations.
able today to address the countries that are composing this ensemble. The stories are never totally similar. They are languages, for instance, that shape territories regardless of the political divides. In order to create that mobility you mention, one needs to know the nature of what is being moved.
AR How might large exhibition events like biennials be a form of soft power in the African scenes?
AR Do governments and politicians have a new interest in the forms of presentation contemporary art offers?
SN Large exhibitions tend to function as loudspeakers. They address an audience that is both inside and outside of the national territories. And in doing so, they introduce a certain togetherness that breaks the boundaries of national identities. They also play the role of laboratories for things to come. Last but not least, they create a sense of pride. Most of the important exhibitions about African art were thought, conceived and shown outside of the continent. I remember the emotion provoked by the opening of Africa Remix in Johannesburg: most of the local newspapers wrote, ‘Africa Remix comes home’. There is a strong psychological dimension in what big events might produce. Not only to the ‘usual suspects’, but on a political level as well. It creates a sense of belonging that is priceless. AR What are the prospects for the development of art’s commercial power in the region? Is the growth of the middle class a necessary factor? SN All the sociologists agree that middle classes are what shape a country. I think that in the case of Africa, it goes both with education and hype. I have witnessed the tremendous changes in the Angolese and Nigerian scenes. People are becoming more and more aware of the importance of culture in the making of a nation. And in this struggle, everyone has a role to play. When we opened the first African art fair in Johannesburg some years ago, my message to the audience was quite clear: you may rightfully complain about all the treasures that were stolen from the continent, a situation that made it difficult for Africans to have a privileged relationship with their own productions. It also created a huge gap in the theories and practices. Today you have the opportunity to write a new page of history. Don’t complain if, tomorrow, all the major productions of the time are hosted by Western museums and collectors. AR You mention nation-making – do you see artists, critics and curators relating themselves to nationality and locality, at a time when the artworld is becoming more networked and ( for some, at least) more mobile? SN The way I use the term ‘national’ does not refer to borders. On the contrary. After the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, the African continent was divided in an artificial manner. What I mean is that, in order to talk about Africa, we should be
SN Some of them do, but they understand the diplomacy power of culture. Few understand its economic interest. Some others are still suspicious about the meaning of contemporary productions. They are still living under the Western influence. Ironically, most of the artists who were recognised at home only made it because the West has praised their talent. AR Where do you see power moving to in the global artworld – not simply in terms of commerce, but in terms of cultural power, or in emerging forms of institution and presentation?
“In the same way that Derrida said he has no sympathy for the victims, I could say that I have no sympathy for the excluded. Because in order to feel excluded, one has to decide on what is the centre and what is the periphery” SN The global artworld needs to redefine itself. We have witnessed the changes introduced by the arrival of the Middle Eastern players. Some other regions might enter the game: India, China… The market that we know is going to open to new players with different criteria, gazes and strategies. I think this shift should work to the advantage of non-Western countries that are not formatted yet by the ancient market. But in order to benefit from this redistribution to come, they need to be ready. The young generation of curators or cultural activists I have mentioned have been creating tools (exhibition spaces, workshops, seminars) in order to increase the level of awareness on the continent. It is always interesting to witness the shift between a project conceived and performed locally and a project conceived abroad and ‘imported’ into the continent. One has to deal with the local realities (funding, audiences, communication…). It forces the young generation to create new models and new ways that they wouldn’t necessarily think of outside of a given context.
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AR In many art centres around the world, political freedom and democracy is often constrained. Can the artworld – as it is evolving in Africa – have a role in influencing positive change in that respect? SN The advantage of art, in many countries, is that it is still perceived as a minor form of expression. The politicians focus more on the written culture, which they find more explicit, and hence more dangerous, for them. Art can bring a subtle contradiction, instil a soft rebellion that may be perceived by people and not by the leader. In Senegal, for instance, the Y’en a marre [‘We’re fed up’] movement was initiated by artists when the former president tried to change the constitution. This group of artists found a tremendous echo in the population, and the presidential project was abandoned. Everyone knows that an artist is never seeking a power position. It allows people to trust them more than any other social actor, because they have ‘nothing to win’ in the battles that they are fighting. AR Does the West matter so much now? And is China just another problem? SN The West still functions as a distorting mirror. But in reality, it does not hold the power it used to have any more. People have been starting to move differently through the world; the old ‘centres’ are not what they used to be. As for China, it is too early to predict. They are too busy trading and making money. But, logically, sooner or later they will enter the game. The non-Western countries should be able to play with the different scenes that are opening. They are no longer condemned to go through the same routes. AR What might internationalism be today? SN I don’t really know. I am not even sure I like that term. I would rather go for universalism, but the way Aimé Césaire described it: the sum of all particularities. It sounds like a wishful dream, for the time being, since all the major decisions are taken by a small number of people. Of course, the situation has improved over the years. Yet it is up to the ‘excluded’ to build strategies for having their say in the global scene. The general feeling, for those who are not part of the global players, is that of exclusion. But that attitude is very negative. In the same way that Derrida said he has no sympathy for the victims, I could say that I have no sympathy for the excluded. Because in order to feel excluded, one has to decide on what is the centre and what is the periphery. For too long a time, the centre has been perceived as being in the West. The first change is hence mental and personal: to change from being the object of external decisions to assuming different possible centralities. ar
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January 2018 2 Jan Artist Christoph Büchel starts a petition calling for eight governmentcommissioned prototypes of the border wall between Mexico and the us to be recognised as Land art and protected under the American Antiquities Act of 1906. Over 450 curators, artists and academics condemn Büchel’s project in an open letter bemoaning art ‘concerned more with spectacle and irony than critically dismantling oppressive structures’
10 Jan Nan Goldin launches a campaign on change.org to hold the Sackler family, prominent arts patrons, and their privately owned company Purdue Pharma accountable for the addictive painkiller OxyContin’s role in the opioid crisis in the us. The campaign demands that the Sacklers fund treatment and education programmes, and that institutions refuse any further donations from the family. The Sackler family and Purdue Pharma deny any wrongdoing
RX# 200, 3 Jan Five women accuse photographer Thomas Roma of sexual misconduct. While denying the allegations, Roma resigns as director of the photography programme at Columbia’s School of the Arts in New York. On 25 January, the National Gallery of Art in Washington cancels its upcoming show of his work
4 Jan The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announces plans to revise its pay-as-you-wish admissions policy to charge out-of-state visitors a mandatory $25, starting 1 March. In July the museum announces recordbreaking attendance figures
5 Jan Wolfgang Tillmans receives the 2018 Goslar Kaiserring prize Gallery-share event Condo returns for its third London edition. Since gallerist Vanessa Carlos launched the initiative in 2015, Condo has staged versions in Shanghai, Mexico City, São Paulo and New York, and spawned similar initiatives like Proyectosla and Ruberta in Los Angeles and Okey Dokey in Düsseldorf and Cologne
11 Jan The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awards arts organisation Rhizome $1m to develop its Webrecorder project, which seeks to build an open-source programme to create archival copies of websites, ‘improving digital social memory for all’
12 Jan The Art, Monuments and Markers commission set up by Mayor Bill de Blasio to review controversial public sculptures in New York rules that all but one should remain in place. The commission advises that contextualising plaques be added to the others under debate. The 90-day commission was triggered by a violent white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, that protested the removal of Confederate memorials
14 Jan Artist Robin Bell projects ‘This place is a shithole’ on the facade of Trump International Hotel in Washington, dc, in reference to the us president’s alleged description of Haiti and African nations as ‘shithole countries’
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15 Jan Experts issue a letter questioning the authenticity of 26 artworks included in a display on Russian Modernism at the Museum of Fine Art (msk) in Ghent. The works are part of the Dieleghem Foundation in Belgium, owned by Russian businessman Igor Toporovski Artists, directors and curators sign an open letter to Documenta’s board demanding the reinstatement of Annette Kulenkampff, ceo of the quinquennial’s parent company. The letter states that the 2017 exhibition’s sizeable deficit ‘arose through a programme concept for which all involved parties shared responsibility’ Culture Unstained, a collective protesting the sponsorship of the arts by oil companies, reveals that the press launch of Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia at the British Museum was used by sponsor bp as an opportunity to meet the Russian ambassador
Triumphs
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Protests
18 Jan Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen contemporary art centre suspends its upcoming Bruce Weber retrospective after 15 male models who worked with the American fashion photographer accused him of coercive sexual behaviour. Condé Nast announces that its publications will no longer work with Weber, who denies the allegations
21 Jan French cultural figures urge the cancellation of a planned 10m-high public artwork by Jeff Koons in front of the Palais de Tokyo, offered by the artist in memory of the victims of the 2015 Paris terror attacks. The signatories accuse Koons of self-promotion, noting that production and installation costs are not included in the gift. In October, the city announces the sculpture will instead be placed in the gardens of the Petit Palais
000 dead 19 Jan The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam cancels its Ettore Sottsass exhibition following a curatorial disagreement with the designer’s widow Barbara Radice
25 Jan The Guggenheim Museum in New York declines to loan Vincent van Gogh’s Landscape with Snow (1888) to the White House. Instead, curator Nancy Spector proposes Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016), a fully functioning, 18-carat gold toilet
24 Jan Middle East analyst Kristian Ulrichsen shares an image on Instagram of a map at the Louvre Abu Dhabi that omits the Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar has been subject to a blockade by a Saudi-led coalition of neighbouring states since June
23 Jan Olu Oguibe’s Monument to Strangers and Refugees (2017), installed in Kassel city centre as part of Documenta 14, is vandalised. The perpetrator says his actions were politically motivated Cho Yoon-sun, ex-culture minister of South Korea under the now impeached Park Geun-hye, is sentenced to two years in jail for her involvement in blacklisting 10,000 people in the creative sector
26 Jan Manchester Art Gallery sparks controversy by putting J.W. Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1869) into storage, so as to ‘prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks’. The stunt is part of a new artwork by Sonia Boyce exploring ‘gender trouble’ in nineteenth-century culture. Critics voice concern that it sets a precedent for institutional censorship
27 Jan David Zwirner opens a new space in Hong Kong, part of a wave of galleries settling in the newly built H Queens tower, including Pace, Hauser & Wirth and Pearl Lam. Zwirner also announces a new $50m Renzo Piano-designed space to open in New York in spring 2020
November 2018
29 Jan The Rubin Foundation awards grants amounting to $777,000 to 60 organisations in New York through its Art and Social Justice initiative
30 Jan The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s proposal for a second campus is approved by the city council, which grants a 35-year lease on a disused building in Wetlands Park
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February
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6 Feb Artist Robert Cenedella files a $100m lawsuit against five major American institutions: the Met, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the New Museum and moma. The artist accuses the institutions of being part of a ‘corporate museum cartel’ that conspires only to promote artists represented by a select few commercial galleries. The museums move to dismiss the lawsuit
5 Feb Artist Mark Grotjahn rejects the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’s 2018 gala award, claiming a lack of diversity among the prize’s previous recipients (who have included Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari) Aaron Bondaroff, cofounder and partner of Los Angeles’s Moran Bondaroff gallery (formerly ohwow) resigns following allegations from three women accusing him of sexual misconduct. The gallery is later renamed Morán Morán
9 Feb Tate director Maria Balshaw apologises in an Instagram post after being criticised by the We Are Not Surprised group for comments she made about sexual harassment in the artworld. Balshaw had told The Times, ‘I personally have never suffered any such issues. Then, I wouldn’t. I was raised to be a confident woman who, when I encountered harassment, would say, “Please don’t”’
7 Feb Tate receives a $1.5m research grant by the Mellon Foundation for conservation of contemporary art, including digital and performance works – the largest research grant in Tate’s history
8 Feb We Are Not Surprised, the group campaigning against sexual harassment in the artworld, calls for a boycott of Artforum in an open letter that urges the artworld not to read, work with or advertise in the magazine until Knight Landesman relinquishes co-ownership and the magazine retracts its motion to dismiss Amanda Schmitt’s lawsuit
Ple
12 Feb Portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, painted by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald respectively, are unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, dc. On 20 March, Hauser & Wirth announce that they will represent Sherald
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Triumphs
Controversies
Protests
ease don’t 18 Feb Artist Neïl Beloufa removes an image of artist Parker Bright protesting Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) painting at the 2017 Whitney Biennial from his Palais de Tokyo exhibition, after Bright starts a campaign accusing Beloufa of ‘appropriating my narrative without consent’
20 Feb Malaysian artist Fahmi Reza is sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and fined rm30,000 ($7,640) for producing a caricature of prime minister Najib Razak. The artist said he was protesting the Sedition Act – a law dating back to colonial rule that prohibits displaying disapproval of the government
21 Feb Artist Santiago Sierra accuses arco Madrid of censorship after one of his artworks is taken down from Helga de Alvear’s booth a few hours before the vip opening. The removal was ordered by ifema, the state exhibition centre hosting the art fair, who claimed it would undermine the ‘visibility’ of the other works in the fair. The work, a series of black-and-white blurred portraits of politicians and activists supporting Catalan independence, is titled Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain (2018)
23 Feb Los Angeles’s J. Paul Getty Museum, the Greek government and the National Technical University of Athens team up for a joint research project looking into how museums can best protect art from earthquakes
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March 1 Mar Pamela Joyner, the collector of African and AfricanAmerican art, is appointed chair of the Tate Americas Foundation
7 Mar María Inés Rodríguez is dismissed as director of capc Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. An open letter signed by various artworld figures decries the move: ‘In France, there is a penury of female directors, presidents, and heads of cultural institutions and this announcement marks a further regression in parity in the strikingly masculine French art world’
9 Mar The mass shooting that left 17 dead at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on 14 February, leads to new calls for gun control legislation in America. Badlands Unlimited, the publishing platform set up by artist Paul Chan, releases a new line of its ‘New Proverbs’ posters featuring slogans including ‘nra takes lives’, ‘fuck you guns’ and ‘ivanka kills teens’. Meanwhile, Anish Kapoor sues the National Rifle Association of America for copyright infringement over their use of an image of his 2006 sculpture Cloud Gate in an online video advert
10 Mar Lafayette Anticipations, the new €21m home of Fondation d’Entreprise Galeries Lafayette, opens in Paris in a nineteenth-century building remodelled by Rem Koolhaas and his oma studio
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12 Mar Helen Molesworth is fired from her job as chief curator of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum cites ‘creative differences’ for her departure. News reports suggest a conflict over curatorial values between Molesworth and director Philippe Vergne. Vergne announces his resignation two months later, saying a mutual agreement has been reached with la moca not to renew his contract, due to end in March 2019
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Triumphs
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15 Mar Gary Xu Gang, one of three curators of the 2018 Shenzhen Biennale, has his contract terminated due to allegations of long-term sexual misconduct Artist Adel Abdessemed removes his controversial videowork Printemps (2013), which features a row of chickens ablaze, from an exhibition at mac Lyon, after complaints from animal rights activists
delete my account 20 Mar Pace opens a new space in Geneva; a few days later, the gallery inaugurates a second Hong Kong outpost in the H Queens Tower, set to coincide with the opening of Art Basel Hong Kong, making it the gallery’s tenth space
16 Mar Los Angeles’s The Broad acquires Yayoi Kusama’s Longing for Eternity (2017), the second of the artist’s Infinity Rooms to enter the collection. The work was first shown in November 2017 across two of David Zwirner’s New York spaces, with a museumlike attendance of 75,000 visitors
21 Mar Following news concerning data harvesting from Facebook, artist Jeremy Deller designs a series of ‘How to Leave Facebook’ posters, which are handed out at stations in London and Liverpool and outside Facebook’s London headquarters
22 Mar Despite threatening budget cuts, Donald Trump increases the funding of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities in the new federal bill, allocating $153m to both federation agencies, $3 million more than each received for the last fiscal year ica Philadelphia becomes the first arts institution to be certified by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (w.a.g.e), the campaign for ethical payment practices
26 Mar Wolfgang Tillmans and architect Rem Koolhaas launch an open call for proposals on how to rebrand the European Union post-Brexit. The submissions should ‘communicat[e] the advantages of cooperation and friendship among people and nations’ and propose ‘ideas [on] how to challenge the organisation itself, how to make it better’ Kristen Windmuller-Luna is named the Brooklyn Museum’s new curator of African art. On 3 April, activists issue an open letter criticising the appointment of a white woman to the role and calling for the museum to create a ‘decolonization commission’ that would reflect ‘the museum’s will to redress ongoing legacies of oppression, especially when it comes to the status of African art and culture’
28 Mar Chinese-Indonesian art collector and founder of Shanghai’s Yuz Museum Budi Tek partners with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to set up a foundation to secure the future of his collection of Chinese and Western contemporary art. Tek will donate most of his holdings to the foundation, which will then be owned equally by the two institutions. An inaugural exhibition is planned for 2019
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April 3 Apr Following French president Emmanuel Macron’s speech advocating the return of African artefacts held in Parisian museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s director, Tristram Hunt, rules out an outright restitution of looted Ethiopian treasures, arguing rather for longterm loans of certain artefacts to their country of origin
10 Apr Max Hollein, the ceo and director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, is appointed director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
13 Apr Less than a year into his tenure as the director of Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre, Chris Dercon steps down from his post. Dercon’s appointment had been met with protests throughout the summer, with activists fearing the curator would steer the organisation away from its radical roots, leading to a six-day occupation of the theatre by antigentrification groups. The statement issued by the City of Berlin reads that ‘the Volksbühne needs a fresh start immediately’ after Dercon’s concept ‘did not work out as hoped’ Artists organise a pro-choice protest at the launch of Eva International, in Limerick. The biennial takes place less than a month before Ireland’s referendum on whether to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which effectively bans abortion. On 25 May, 66.4 percent vote to remove the ban
14 Apr Cleaners from the investment firm Ernst & Young (ey) picket London’s Tate Modern to protest a consultation over their contracts, which they fear will lead to dismissals. ey is the main sponsor of the gallery’s new Picasso exhibition
66.4% 16 Apr Art critic Jerry Saltz wins the Pulitzer Prize for criticism
17 Apr Istanbul’s arts space salt Beyoğlu reopens after a hiatus of over two years. salt closed the venue in January 2016, claiming ‘technical reasons’, although rumours pointed to government pressure (the organisation continued to hold exhibitions and events in other spaces in Istanbul and Ankara, however)
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17 Apr The Museum of Modern Art, New York, sues café MoMaCha for copyright infringement. The museum argues that the Manhattan green-tea cafe, which also says it is an art gallery, uses a name and branding that is likely to confuse visitors. The court rules that the café must change its name
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19 Apr New eu money-laundering regulations require art dealers to verify the identity of clients buying works over €10,000. The International Confederation of Art and Antique Dealer Associations protest that the laws are ‘an unacceptable burden on the art market business’ Collector Steven Tananbaum sues Jeff Koons and the artist’s dealer Gagosian in New York Supreme Court, claiming they failed to deliver three sculptures Tananbaum had paid $13m for. The complaint accuses Koons of exploiting collectors’ desire to own his sculptures to support Ponzi-like schemes. On 30 April, film producer Joel Silver files a lawsuit against Gagosian, which he alleges has failed to deliver an $8m Koons Balloon Venus sculpture
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exploiting collectors’ collectors desire
20 Apr Fondazione Prada opens the Torre in Milan, a 60m-high white concrete tower designed by Rem Koolhaas’s firm oma. It marks the completion of its 19,000sqm art complex that launched in 2015. The fashion house also opened Prada Rong Zhai, a new cultural centre housed in a Shanghai mansion
24 Apr The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund pledges $10m to support arts initiatives that engage with mental health issues in New York
23 Apr Ai Weiwei defends posing for a selfie with the German far-right politician and parliamentary leader of the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party, Alice Weidel. ‘I don’t believe that differences in political views or values between people should act as a barrier in communication,’ Ai said
diverse programming is not enough
26 Apr Forensic Architecture, Naeem Mohaiemen, Charlotte Prodger and Luke Willis Thompson are shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Willis Thompson’s nomination is criticised for rewarding a ‘white-passing’ artist who makes work about racial violence The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opens in Montgomery, Alabama. Inspired by Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, it is dedicated to us victims of lynching, and is the first of its kind in the country. It was established in parallel with the Legacy Museum, which also confronts the history and legacy of whitesupremacist terror in the country
28 Apr Swiss bargain website QoQa sell 40,000 shares in Picasso’s Musketeer Bust (1968), for usd$51 each. The resulting 25,000 investors will collectively decide where the painting is shown
29 Apr Activist groups including Decolonize This Place occupy the Brooklyn Museum, calling for the museum to diversify its staff and to remove board-president David Berliner, as well as to make efforts to challenge gentrification. ‘Diverse programming is not enough! It is cosmetic solidarity. The museum wants our art, our culture, but not our people,’ states protest leader Shellyne Rodriguez
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Ekaterina Degot “It is complicated”
Ekaterina Degot isn’t afraid of a little confrontation. The curator recently used her debut as director of Steirischer Herbst in Graz to expose the ‘little fascisms’ underpinning the far right’s resurgence, provocatively entitling it Volksfronten. Born and raised in the Soviet Union, Degot worked as a critic before coming to wider attention as cocurator, with David Riff, of the first Bergen Assembly in 2013 and as director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne, between 2014 and 2017. We talked to her in the wake of Steirischer Herbst, which proved predictably controversial in a country now governed by a coalition including the far-right Freedom Party, about freedom, identity and protest. ArtReview Does art have any power politically? Ekaterina Degot When I am asked something like this, all I want to say is, ‘It is complicated’. There is a short story titled ‘She Straightened Me Out’ [1885] by Gleb Uspensky, an obscure nineteenth-century Russian writer. The protagonist, whom we meet as a teacher in a remote village, recollects what happened 12 years before, when he was a ‘nihilist’ political activist, working as a private tutor for the children of a rich family. With them in Paris in 1873 he witnesses the dead bodies of Communards on the streets and the defeat of the Revolution he hoped for. Depressed, he goes to the Louvre, where a miracle occurs: he sees the Venus de Milo and suddenly the feeling of being a crumpled glove evaporates. For a Russian reader of that time, the untold story is clear: in 1885 the protagonist is in exile, suggesting that in the late 1870s he must have resumed his political activism with the radicals of [the revolutionary organisation] Narodnaya Volya. He failed again, but the picture of the Venus is on his wall. That an artwork might have political power is an unpredictable longshot. As is the requirement that it reach beyond the artist’s own class, gender, ethnic or political group. I am gradually less fascinated by hermetic and self-referential post-Duchampian art that made me laugh happily for so many years – the rightwing turn
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in the world has probably something to do with it – and nowadays I am more inspired by artists, in whatever form or media, who profess or question realisms. But then, the whole point of art is to create very different things, and artists have no obligation to supply anti-rightwing works. That is where a curator might come in, to interpret even an artist’s most hermetic work politically. We curators have lots of work in front of us in the years to come, as the rightwing nationalist fog seems to persist. AR Should art in this political climate seek to foster unity or to provoke opposition? ED It should foster unity in opposition, include as many people as possible and be very open to a nonprofessional public. Create alliances rather than alienations. It is a huge challenge, I know. But it is not even being acknowledged. AR Are there any particular curatorial strategies that you think might help in this? ED Times are dark, but not so dark that art would be denied its public role. One has to use the chances that are still with us, and use the opportunity to speak politically to those who might be rejecting or ignoring this belief in political art, or even to those who disagree
“I am so disappointed that the artworld so often preaches to the converted. Curators should make shows that are challenging, but are still generous with the audience, to whom, I believe, we owe the image and the story of their life. The worst thing is to remain unapproachable. And I do not mean any shift towards ‘emotions’, no: this generosity should be intellectual, aesthetical”
ArtReview
with our political positions. I am so disappointed that the artworld so often preaches to the converted. Curators should make shows that are challenging, but are still generous with the audience, to whom, I believe, we owe the image and the story of their life. The worst thing is to remain unapproachable. And I do not mean any shift towards ‘emotions’, no: this generosity should be intellectual, aesthetical. AR There seems to be a general crisis or disquiet in the biennial format – perhaps acknowledged by your work in Bergen. What point do they serve that a ‘normal’ exhibition cannot? What is their future? ED I am for biennials and festival formats, because this is precisely where art has a chance to go public, to those who are not typical museum visitors. In Bergen Assembly, there were perhaps expectations that we as curators would question the form of an exhibition, that instead of a show there would be endless talks addressing whether we need biennials or not. This approach is a form of navel-gazing self-sabotage, though. We did make an exhibition and it was, I dare to say, anything but dry and boring. I believe this is what big international exhibitions like biennials can do: tell a story that is relevant. But museum shows can and should do that as well, it is just that they are in the business of writing art history, while a biennial is perhaps akin to a journal, or a newspaper even. AR Can art be more than a victim? ED One must resist this feeling of being a victim. As someone who lived in the Soviet Union, I can say that oppressive censorship might be stimulating for art and engenders lots of irony and other nice artistic devices. But this is not what is happening in Western society currently. What is happening is self-censorship, an ‘internalised fatwa’, as Kenan Malik put it, where the left itself gets obsessed about the different sensitivities of various groups. I believe, not to be a victim, art has to be aware of existing in an agonistic public sphere – that is, of course, if an artist is privileged enough to live in such a context and not under a life-threatening dictatorship. ar
Ekaterina Degot. Photo: Christian Benesch
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May
1 May Nine Nazi-looted artworks and ancient artefacts from the collections of several state museums in Berlin are returned to the Jewish-German newspaper publisher Rudolf Mosse’s heirs. The returns are part of a larger restitution project that is tracing over 1,000 artworks that the Nazis are believed to have stolen from Mosse
5 May The Cuban government causes problems for the #00Bienal de La Habana – an alternative biennial spearheaded by local artists after the country’s state-backed biennial was cancelled because of Hurricane Irma – by threatening exhibitors, detaining participants and refusing entry into the country to artists including Coco Fusco and Diego Gil
10 May The producers of Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film, The Image Book (2018), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, announce that it will be adapted as an interactive art exhibition, set to tour to various institutions
9 May Activists from Greenpeace stage an intervention at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, to protest Volkswagen’s sponsorship of the exhibition The Future Starts Here. The protest, in which they dismantle a vw Golf car in the v&a courtyard, is part of the ngo’s ‘Ditch Diesel’ campaign demanding vw invest in electric cars instead
flagrant exclusivity 11 May New York’s Guggenheim show Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World tours to the museum’s Bilbao satellite, which decides to include two of the three works that were pulled from the New York show following animal-rights protests The all-male shortlist for the Belgian Art Prize comes under fire in an open letter signed by hundreds of Belgian art professionals who protest its ‘flagrant exclusivity’. The 2019 nominees – Sven Augustijnen, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Gabriel Kuri and Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys – announce their withdrawal from the award
16 May Kerry James Marshall’s Past Times (1997) sells for $21.1m (with fees) at Sotheby’s Postwar & Contemporary evening sale, more than four times the artist’s previous auction record and the new record for a living African-American artist. The buyer is revealed as American rapper and music mogul Sean Combs (aka P. Diddy) The European Cultural Foundation’s Award for Culture has been awarded to Londonbased investigative agency Forensic Architecture and Polish cultural platform Borderland
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17 May Mark Coetzee steps down from his position as the chief curator and executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town following an inquiry into his professional conduct
Money
18 May The third edition of Art Stage Jakarta, due to take place in early September, is postponed to 2019. Organisers give logistical problems caused by the 2018 Asian Games and ongoing election campaigning as the reason for their decision The Rothko Chapel in Houston is vandalised, with white paint poured into an ornamental pool surrounding The Broken Obelisk (1963–67), a Barnett Newman sculpture dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr. Leaflets that read ‘It’s okay to be white’ are found scattered across the grounds, prompting David Leslie, the executive director of the chapel, to describe it as a ‘hate incident’
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19 May Yiannis Boutaris, the mayor of Thessaloniki and an advocate for multiculturalism and lgbtqi+ communities, is hospitalised after being attacked by a far-right mob. More than 120 participants in Documenta 14 pen a letter to Boutaris, expressing their solidarity
21 May Interview, the art, culture and fashion magazine founded by Andy Warhol, closes after filing for bankruptcy. In September the title relaunches after being repurchased by its previous owner Peter Brant, via a newly founded holding company. Despite owing $3.3m to hundreds of former employees and freelancers, the new company means he is no longer liable for the previous company’s debts
23 May Nicolaus Schafhausen says he will step down from his role as director of Kunsthalle Wien in March 2019 – three years before his contract is due to end – citing the ‘resurgence of nationalist politics in Austria’. In December Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of the far-right Freedom Party (founded by a former ss officer) became vice-chancellor of the country’s new coalition government
modern art ancient wages 24 May At the Venice Architecture Biennale, Guangdong Yuegang Investment Development announce the Valley xl project, a major new arts district in Xinglong Valley, Hebei province, China: the ‘eco-city’, set to open in 2019, will feature a museum for contemporary art as well as artists’ studios
25 May After delays, Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun – Centre for Heritage and Art opens. The centre, located in the former Central Police Station with new buildings designed by Herzog & de Meuron, is a collaboration between the government and the Hong Kong Jockey Club
29 May After a government inquiry into uk companies with more than 250 employees exposed a lack of women in top roles and significant gender pay gaps at major auction houses, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams pledge to improve representation and correct the imbalance in remuneration (women employees at Bonhams are reported to earn 37 percent less than men). A week later, Sotheby’s and Christie’s announce they will drop the exclusive use of female staff to pose in their promotional photographs of artworks, instead relying on both male and female handlers Lee Bul’s Majestic Splendour (1991–2018), an installation that includes decaying fish, spontaneously catches fire hours before her retrospective is due to open at London’s Hayward Gallery. The opening is cancelled
spontaneous combustion 30 May London’s Serpentine Galleries launches its first overseas pavilion, designed by jiakun Architects, in Beijing. Modelled on the institution’s annual pavilion project in London, it is located in Hongkong Land’s wf Central, a retail and hospitality development in the Dongcheng district
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31 May Unionised employees of moma, New York, protest outside the museum’s annual gala with placards reading ‘Modern Art Ancient Wages’ and ‘Glitzy New Tower Shabby Old Wages’. In August, an agreement is reached with the museum’s administration, over a three percent wage increase and updates to healthcare and seniority benefits
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4 Jun Okwui Enwezor steps down as artistic director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, citing health reasons. In August, the institution announces the cancellation of Joan Jonas’s show, which was due to travel to Munich in November after its debut at Tate Modern, citing financial difficulties. The €500,000 shortfall, according to hdk’s commercial director, Bernhard Spies, is a direct result of Enwezor’s programming, deemed too ambitious for the institution’s budget. Enwezor rejects any responsibility for such deficit, saying the show’s cancellation was ‘one of the most shocking things in my professional experience’ A new study reports that only 110 Confederate monuments and symbols have been taken down since the Charleston massacre in 2015 sparked a campaign to remove symbols from that era. Titled ‘Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy’ and conducted by American nonprofit and civil rights advocacy group the Southern Poverty Law Center, the study claims that there are still 1,740 such symbols in public spaces across the country
3 Jun Art nonprofit For Freedoms launches Kickstarter campaigns to fund its 50 State Initiative, considered the largest public-art project in us history. Founded by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, the organisation plans 52 artist-designed billboards to be installed across the us. Launching in September, ahead of the midterm elections in November, it brings together more than 200 partners and 175 artists, including Theaster Gates, Trevor Paglen and Carrie Mae Weems, aiming to spark political engagement across the country
YES
15 Jun Joan Jonas wins ¥ 100m (c. $900,000) Kyoto Prize for Art
5 Jun Brooklyn Museum acquires work by 96 female artists as part of its ‘A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum’ programme
16 Jun Manifesta 12 opens in Palermo to critical acclaim. The Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence, cocurated by Bregtje van der Haak, Andrés Jaque, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Mirjam Varadinis, features interdisciplinary projects by artists, architects and thinkers across 20 venues, ranging from long-neglected palaces to Palermo’s lush botanical garden Fire guts the Glasgow School of Art’s iconic Mackintosh building only a few months before its planned reopening, and following extensive restoration work in the wake of a 2014 blaze. gsa vows to restore the building Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s music video for Apeshit, shot in the galleries of the Louvre in Paris, goes viral. Featuring people of colour performing synchronised choreography in front of the museum’s artworks, the video is seen to highlight and challenge the marginalisation and underrepresentation of bodies of colour in the Western cultural canon
14 Jun During Art Basel in Basel, Shanghai-based gallery Shanghart and Brussels gallery Waldburger Wouters open Büro, a new collaborative project space in the Swiss city, marking the first time a major Chinese gallery has opened a permanent space in Europe
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Protests
20 Jun On World Refugee Day, artist Banu Cennetoğlu publishes a list in The Guardian that features the names of over 34,000 migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers who died while trying to reach Europe since 1993. In July, the list – compiled and updated by antidiscrimination network united for Intercultural Action and distributed by Cennetoğlu since 2002 – is displayed on hoardings surrounding a building site as part of the artist’s commission for the Liverpool Biennial. After repeated vandalism, Cennetoğlu decides not to restore the torn installation as a ‘reminder of the systematic violence exercised against people’
standoff 26 Jun Artists and performers including Laurie Anderson, Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky condemn the Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany for cancelling a performance by Young Fathers, after the Scottish band supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (bds) movement for Palestinian rights. ‘As a German, it is of course difficult for me to be linked to a movement that boycotts Israel,’ says festival director Stefanie Carp. Amid growing criticism, Carp eventually reinvites the group, which declines to perform In an ongoing standoff between Greece and the uk, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras asks that uk Prime Minister Theresa May return the Elgin Marbles, currently in the British Museum collection. The marbles were taken from the Acropolis in the nineteenth century, as Tsirpas pointed out during his first official visit to the uk in 2015
28 Jun Cheim & Read, which represents the likes of Jenny Holzer, Alice Neel and Sean Scully, close their New York gallery after 21 years, as they ‘transition to a private practice’ The A.M. Qattan Foundation, a new cultural centre in the occupied West Bank, opens to the public. Boasting 7,700sqm, the Ramallah-based foundation provides new studios, galleries and educational spaces. Two months prior, Palestine Museum us, the first museum dedicated to Palestinian art and culture in the United States, opens in Woodbridge, Connecticut Following a push by German Culture Minister Monika Grütters, the parliament approves a 9 percent increase in federal spending on culture, bringing the total budget to €1.8bn
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July
failure to address sexual harassment and racism 4 Jul Director of Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, Jean-Marc Bustamante, resigns from his post following criticism by students over a perceived failure to address sexual harassment and racism complaints
3 Jul lacma announces further delays in its expansion amid fundraising and construction hurdles. Inflation and Donald Trump’s tariff on steel imports further complicate the capital project, with $100m on a target of $650m still to be raised
6 Jul Curator Nikki Columbus files a lawsuit against moma ps1 over gender and caregiver discrimination, after the institution allegedly revoked a job offer on learning she was pregnant
10 Jul Curator Daniel Birnbaum leaves his post as director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, to lead vr company Acute Art
12 Jul Tel Aviv’s 1:1 Center for Art and Politics comes under fire for showing work by Arab artists without their consent in its inaugural exhibition, Stolen Arab Art. The gallery says it decided not to credit or attribute the works – by artists including Wael Shawky and Walid Raad – ‘on the assumption that they would not want for their work to be shown in Israel’ – in reference to the Arab and international cultural boycott of the country
13 Jul Angus Montgomery Arts, Tim Etchells and mch Group, the last being a Swiss conglomerate that owns, among others, the Art Basel fairs, announce the launch of art sg, a new contemporary art fair in Singapore, scheduled for November 2019. Aside from the Art Basel network, mch also has majority stakes in Masterpiece London and the India Art Fair, as well as a 25.1 percent stake in art.fair International, the organiser behind the recently launched Art Düsseldorf. A local fair initiative, led by Singapore’s stpi, titled s.e.a. Focus, has previously been announced and will take place in January 2019, at the same time as Singapore’s existing fair Art Stage
16 Jul Twenty-seven art historians and art educators take the National Gallery, London, to an employment tribunal claiming unlawful dismissal. The plaintiffs seek to be recognised as ‘employees’ (and at a minimum ‘workers’), and not ‘selfemployed’, after having worked regularly at the gallery from 10 to more than 40 years
15 Jul Four members of Russian activist group Pussy Riot storm the pitch during the France–Croatia soccer World Cup final dressed as Russian police officers. The collective claims the intervention to be a performance titled Policeman enters the Game, and was intended to highlight Russia’s political prisoners
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18 July Politicians from Germany’s Green Party launch a petition against the rise of far-right politics across the continent, demanding the arts be free from any political interference. ‘Politicians should not judge art, or try to instrumentalize it […] Art is free, it does not have to please and it must not serve,’ reads the statement, titled ‘The Brussels Declaration’. In October the city of Kassel announces the removal of Olu Oguibe’s towering obelisk Monument to Strangers and Refugees, commissioned for Documenta 14, from Königsplatz after increased pressure from the country’s rightwing AfD party
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19 Jul The director of the Seoul Museum of Art, Choi Hyo-jun, is suspended from his position following a sexual harassment complaint filed by a female museum employee In the wake of the controversy surrounding Sam Durant’s Scaffold installation in 2017, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, announces the formation of an Indigenous Public Art Selection Committee, composed of native curators, artists and cultural professionals. Durant’s work, which references the largest mass execution conducted in the us, in which 38 Dakota people were killed in 1862 in nearby Mankato, Minnesota, was criticised by elements of the Dakota community who accused the museum and the artist of appropriating a painful chapter of their history. The artist later apologised to the community and, following a discussion with the Walker and the Dakota elders, agreed that the work be dismantled and ceremonially burned by the elders
ACT UP
25 Jul Over 40 artists and designers call for their work to be removed from the Design Museum in London after it allowed its building to be hired for a private event connected to the arms industry. On 2 August, the museum returns a third of the artworks on show in its exhibition Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–18. The exhibitors, including Jeremy Deller, Shepard Fairey and the Guerrilla Girls, mount a separate show featuring the pulled artworks during the London Design Festival in September, under the title From Nope to Hope: Art vs Arms, Oil and Injustice
27 Jul Protesters from act up, the aids Coalition to Unleash Power, picket the Whitney Museum’s David Wojnarowicz retrospective in New York, accusing the show of historicising the continuing aids epidemic. ‘We are here tonight to honor David’s art and activism by explicitly connecting them to the present day. When we talk about hiv/aids without acknowledging that there’s still an epidemic – including in the United States – the crisis goes quietly on and people continue to die,’ reads the protesters’ mission statement. Wojnarowicz was a member of act up until his death aged thirty-seven in 1992. The museum invites the protesters to restage their intervention the following weekend and amend the exhibition’s interpretation
23 Jul Facebook comes under fire for deleting a painting by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, depicting nude women and cherubs, which featured in social media advertising by the Flemish tourism bureau. The bureau write an open letter to Facebook ceo Mark Zuckerberg, criticising the company’s rules around nudity and its inability to distinguish between art and pornography. Facebook pledges to review its ‘approach to nudity in paintings in ads on Facebook’ Austrian artist Katharina Cibulka covers the facade of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with a monumental embroidered message: ‘As long as the art market is a boys’ club, I will be a feminist’. Cibulka, along with school rector Eva Blimlinger, hope to raise awareness about the gender imbalance within the artworld
31 Jul Klaus Biesenbach is announced as new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, leaving moma, where he was chief curator (and director of moma ps1). Outgoing moca director Philippe Vergne announced his resignation in May, having controversially fired chief curator Helen Molesworth a few months earlier
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James Bridle “The fight is still definitely on”
James Bridle. Courtesy British Council/Strelka, Moscow
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James Bridle is an artist and writer based in London. His writing and blogging on the cultural effects of networked technology have turned increasingly to the unforeseen consequences of social media and surveillance technology, brought together in his new book The New Dark Age. ArtReview catches up with Bridle in Berlin, where he’s busy installing Agency – a group show of artists whose work looks at ways of rethinking powerlessness and agency in the face of these vast and increasingly opaque systems. ArtReview The show at NOME takes for a starting point that we appear to be powerless in the face of unimaginably complex new technologies. How does that powerlessness manifest, and how can it be resisted? JAMES BRIDLE We measure ourselves against the entities that we’re capable of addressing, but as those entities have become ever larger and more diffuse – transnational governance and financial regimes, fully automated corporations, opaque computational networks, the global climate – our ability to respond is diminished. The result of that is fear and anger, or apathy, the dominant impulses of our times, which have very concrete psychological roots in our inability to make sense of the world around us. When power is abstracted to the degree that it becomes both unassailable and almost invisible, we are unable to think clearly, and we feel utterly powerless in response. This is not necessarily because we actually lack power, but because we lack any systemic understanding or narrative cohesion with which to construct a response. So one way to resist such power is to delve into both the given systems – technological, financial – and into excluded systems – magic, mythology, non-Western traditions – to gain literacy in them, so that those narratives can be rewritten, or overwritten. AR What is the relationship between creativity – artmaking, storytelling – and agency in that context? JB Whereas literacy is the ability to read the situation, agency is the capacity to take action. In complex systems, agency might simply be that degree of autonomy, knowledge and stability that allows one to operate without falling into fear or apathy: it’s the baseline for doing anything at all. In the domain of artmaking and storytelling, agency is the freedom to move around a subject, to manipulate it, to enact one’s will, to have some say or stake in the narrative produced, and in the shape of the world. AR Early cybernetic utopianism was often about perfecting political and economic control – is there still human political power behind the machines, or can no one claim control? What are the prospects for human democracy?
JB There’s plenty of political power behind the machines, and it’s mostly in the wrong hands, but the fight is still definitely on. The opacity of contemporary computational systems favours control by those with the most power and knowledge in the present, whether that’s oppressive governments or a technological priesthood. But that’s not a fixed state. Spend any time around those with apparent power – politicians or engineers at Internet giants – and you quickly see how limited their appreciation of their own agency is: in most cases, they lack systemic literacy too. Present conditions are no guide to future possibilities – but the track we’re on hardly bends towards democracy, and it’s precisely the democratisation of agency that is needed to face the systemic crises of our age: securitisation, automation and climate change. AR What does it mean to ‘enchant’ present conditions? How does that undermine the established networks of power? JB In my book I write about how certain narratives – certain understandings of the world – are baked into the tools we use every day, and once baked in they become hard to see and hard to question. When one has a hammer, goes the saying, everything looks like a nail. But this is to not think the hammer. The hammer, properly conceived, has many uses. It may pull nails as well as drive them; it may forge iron, shape wood and stone, reveal fossils and fix anchors for climbing ropes. It may pass sentence, call to order, or be thrown in a contest of athletic strength. Wielded by a god, it generates the weather. To write new narratives – and crucially, to recognise our power to do so – is what I mean by reenchantment. Established networks of power are built upon the promulgation of dominant narratives that benefit the entrenched incumbents: trickle-down economics, nationalism, the value of data. To reenchant our tools and make magic under present conditions is thus to heat the mould so that these narratives can be recast. AR What are the practical means by which it is possible to wrest back power? Through the formation of new communities? By learning how to operate, or to sabotage, the instruments of power? JB These are all valid strategies – but they are all individually insufficient. It’s absolutely necessary to understand and thus be able to operate and negate the tools of power, and because it’s impossible for any single individual to technically understand everything in the system, this practice of sense-making is not one of technical explanation, but one of imaginative storytelling. We know too that these tools alone will never dismantle the master’s house, and therefore we need to create radically different
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systems in which to practice. The excitement – and inherent utopianism – of the early Internet was largely a product of its communities, which allowed people to break out and away from the communities of knowledge, practice and constraint in which they had been living. Unfortunately, the counterrevolution of the Internet brought these communities back under control, either through capitalisation (the mall-ification of the Internet) or surveillance, so that it’s much harder once again to have free – as in speech and in beer – conversations. But we’re starting to build those tools too: open-source, peer-to-peer, distributed, anonymous (from power, but not from one another). AR The new technologies are capitalist means by which to make money from people through the gathering of information; do you still believe in technology’s potential to significantly change economic relations? JB That’s not my definition of technologies. I prefer Ursula Le Guin’s: ‘They’re what we can learn to do’. So while it’s obvious that surveillance capitalism is the primary mode of the globalised technologies in production today, all that tells us is that paranoid capitalists are still in charge of production. Surprise! Technology will do whatever we want it to do, when we figure out who ‘we’ are and what we want. Deciding that neither of those questions will be answered by economics might be a good start. AR What does the art ‘world’ have to offer – or is there still an art ‘world’ to speak of? Or does ‘art’ now describe a mode of practice, and how might it be characterised? JB There are many art worlds, many types of artists and many ways of making art. For myself, I am interested in art’s capacity to inflect or change the narrative of present conditions: in works that do work. The waters are rising and the works that I am interested in right now are ones that lay down duckboards. The role of bad actors should never be ignored, but the crises of democracy, movement and climate change that we are presented with are primarily crises of narrative, of imagination, of our ability to think. Narrative, imagination, thoughtfulness outside the established bounds of good behaviour: these are precisely the skills of art. The artists gathered in this show, which takes Agency for its title, all have very different modes of practice, but the result is the same: the shattering of that feeling of powerlessness, and the recasting of narratives for different ends. ar Agency is at NOME, Berlin, through 7 December. Artists exhibiting are Morehshin Allahyari, Sophia Al-Maria, Ingrid Burrington, Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Constant Dullaart, Anna Ridler and Suzanne Treister
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2 August In an attempt to stop ‘illegal’ tours of its premises, Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery effectively bans all visitors from discussing the works on view. One teacher visiting the Vasily Vereshchagin exhibition with his students was asked to leave by a guard insisting that ‘groups of one to 20 people’ needed special permission to visit the gallery Members of Polish feminist art collective ‘Bison Ladies, We Say No’ occupy an exhibition by Japanese erotic photographer Nobuyoshi Araki at Warsaw’s Raster Gallery, in solidarity with Araki’s longtime model Kaori, who has accused him of ‘emotional bullying’ and exploitation
3 August Chinese authorities raze Ai Weiwei’s Zuoyou Studio on the outskirts of Beijing with little warning. Last year Heiqiao village, known for its low-rent artist studios, was demolished, and in May in Caochangdi, X Gallery and de Sarthe Gallery were evicted ahead of demolition
5 August Photographer Shahidul Alam is arrested by Bangladeshi police at his home in Dhaka for ‘provocative comments’ just a few hours after an interview concerning the increasingly violent repression of student protests across the country was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. Over 400 artists sign an online petition for his release
cleared of criminal wrongdoing
9 August Former Documenta ceo Annette Kulenkampff is cleared of criminal wrongdoing, following an investigation brought by the Kassel state prosecutor’s office into the $6.3m budget shortfall of the 2017 edition. The investigation was launched after members of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party filed a lawsuit accusing Kulenkampff and curator Adam Szymczyk of mismanaging public funds
12 August The Al-Meshal Cultural Center, a Palestinian arts centre located in the west of Gaza City, is destroyed by Israel, who claims it was being used as a headquarters by Hamas, the Palistinian Islamist organisation controlling the Gaza Strip. Hamas later claims that the Israeli Defense Forces had targeted the wrong building, and that its headquarters were in fact positioned across the road
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13 August Mauricio Rojas, Chile’s recently appointed culture minister, resigns after criticism over some comments he’d made in 2015. Rojas initially came under fire when the Chilean press picked up on an excerpt from a book he’d coauthored, in which he questioned the legitimacy of the Museum of History and Human Rights in Santiago, which documents abuses committed during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–90)
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21 August Directors of uk arts festivals including the Manchester International Festival and Womad write to the Home Office calling for a more transparent visa application process after an increase in the number of artists refused entry. Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, calls the process ‘humiliating’
29 August The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague end long-term sponsorship deals with Shell following a series of protests by activist organisation Fossil Free Culture Berlin’s Arratia Beer gallery closes its doors after 12 years. It was one among a number of midsize galleries to close in the city last year, including Silberkuppe and Micky Schubert
21 August Queermuseu, the exhibition of queer art in Brazil shut down at Santander Cultural in Porto Alegre after being picketed by conservative activists, reopens at Rio de Janeiro’s Parque Lage School of Visual Arts to large crowds. The exhibition is revived thanks to one of the country’s biggest crowdfunding campaigns, which raises over $250,000
drop the shell 28 August A statue of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is removed from Germany’s Wiesbaden Biennale after it caused skirmishes between the Turkish president’s critics and supporters. Organisers hoped the artwork would trigger debate around the biennial’s theme of ‘bad news’
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September 1 Sep Beijing’s ucca announces its first permanent exhibition space outside of the city. ucca Dune, situated in the Beidaihe District of Hebei province, opens in October with a show entitled After Nature
#noaldec 3 Sep An open letter signed by leading cultural figures denounces the gender disparity at this year’s photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. The letter claims that out of the 15 major monographic exhibitions staged during the event only three include works made by female artists
2 Sep A fire rips through the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, destroying an estimated 90 percent of the museum’s 20 million historical, scientific and anthropological artefacts. The following day, police in riot gear clash with demonstrators who blame the fire on government neglect
5 Sep New York art dealer Mary Boone pleads guilty to charges of tax fraud. Boone will pay a restitution of $3m to the Internal Revenue Service and faces up to six years in jail. She will be sentenced in January
6 Sep Art Basel Cities launches in Buenos Aires with a largescale weeklong public-art exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani. The art-fair powerhouse will act as longterm consultants to ‘celebrate the city’s thriving cultural ecosystem and facilitate exchanges between the international and Argentine artworlds’. Art Basel’s fee is said to be more than $2m. Local media question whether this is an appropriate use of public funds in the midst of a severe economic downturn Greenspon Gallery in New York cancels an exhibition with Boyd Rice after critics allege the artist and noise musician has neo-Nazi sympathies, has previously collaborated with white supremacists and holds extreme views on the subjugation of women. Rice denies being a neo-Nazi
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Triumphs
Controversies
Protests
10 Sep Veronika Nikulshina and Peter Verzilov of Russian activist group Pussy Riot are arrested in Moscow. While no reason was given for the arrests, the group claims it is retaliation for Pussy Riot’s pitch invasion during the World Cup final. Soon after their release, Verzilov falls critically ill and is hospitalised – doctors confirm he was poisoned
creto349 12 Sep Cuba issues Decree 349, a law, due to take effect on 7 December, that eliminates independent cultural initiatives and gives the state the power to confiscate materials, seize property and close down cultural events that have not secured government preapproval. Tania Bruguera, Coco Fusco and others issue the Manifesto de San Isidro in protest, which states: ‘No cultural action should ever be cause for political repression and abuse of power’ Twenty former dancers from Jan Fabre’s dance company Troubleyn accuse the Belgian artist of humiliation, intimidation and sexual harassment. The Flemish ministry of culture launches an investigation. Fabre and the company deny the claims Bartomeu Marí, the first foreign director of Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (mmca), announces his resignation after three years in the job. The previous day Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism had announced that they would be issuing an open call for Marí’s successor
17 Sep Art Dubai confirms the loss of their lead sponsor, following the collapse of private equity firm Abraaj Group amid criminal proceedings. The corporate art collection is auctioned by the company’s liquidators in London in October, raising $5.7m
20 Sep Perrotin opens a new outpost in Shanghai, the gallery’s sixth space, and its fourth in Asia, with an exhibition by Wim Delvoye
22 Sep Serralves Museum artistic director João Ribas resigns after claiming he was forced to remove 20 sexually explicit works from a Robert Mapplethorpe survey and place age restrictions on the exhibition. One hundred fifty art professionals sign an open letter condemning the museum’s actions; Portuguese collector Luiz Teixeira de Freitas withdraws his loan of 700 drawings to the museum’s collection in solidarity with Ribas 27 Sep Chinese curator and critic Li Bowen resigns as associate editor of the online magazine Ocula after a widely circulated anonymous WeChat post accuses him of behaviour that falls in a ‘gray area between morality and law’, including ‘gaslighting’, sexual coercion and emotional abuse
23 Sep A man attacks Marina Abramović at the opening of her show at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, smashing the performance artist over the head with a portrait he had painted of her
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Image Credits
pp 68–69 (October) Kara Walker receives the 2017 W.E.B. Du
pp 82–83 (April) Police cars stand in front of the Volksbühne
Bois Medal at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre in
theatre, Berlin, 28 September 2017, photo: Maurizio
Cambridge, MA, photo: Paul Marotta/Getty Images;
Gambarini/AFP/Getty Images; Artists Campaign to Repeal
Decolonize this Place lead an ‘anti-Columbus Day tour’
the Eighth Amendment, Repeal!, 2018 (installation view),
of the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
photo: Deirdre Power, courtesy the artists and EVA
photo: Catherine Gonzalez; Chinatown Art Brigade’s first
International; the original MoMaCha logo, in front of their
protest against Omer Fast’s exhibition at James Cohan
New York tea shop, courtesy MoMaCha; Ai Weiwei and Alice
Gallery, New York, photo: Kah Ean Chang; image via
Weidel, image via Twitter: @Alice_Weidel; Torre Fondazione
Instagram: @sanity_adjacent.
Prada, Milan, 2018, photo: Bas Princen, courtesy Fondazione Prada; The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, 2018,
pp 70–71 (November) People protest the visit of Judith Butler
photo: Soniakapadia, licensed under Creative Commons.
to Brazil, in São Paulo, photo: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images; a user experiencing Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s VR work
pp 86–87 (May) Greenpeace protest, V&A, London,
Carne Y Arena, 2017, photo: Emmanuel Lubezki; Leonardo
photo: Chris J Ratcliffe, courtesy Greenpeace; Kerry James
da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, c. 1500, oil on walnut, 66 × 45 cm,
Marshall, Past Times, 1997, acrylic and collage on canvas,
licensed to public domain; Center for Political Beauty’s Holocaust Memorial in Bornhagen with the home of Bjorn
3 × 4 m, © the artist, courtesy MCA Chicago; Agnès Varda on the September 2018 cover of Interview, photographed by
Höcke in the background, photo: Patryk Witt/Center for
Collier Schorr; Instagram graphic produced by MoMA Local
Political Beauty.
2110 union, courtesy: MoMA Local 2110.
pp 72–73 (December) Artist Jaishri Abichandani leads a protest
pp 88–89 (June) Betye Saar, Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail,
of the Raghubir Singh exhibition outside the Met Breuer
1973, mixed-media assemblage, 31 × 46 cm, © the artist,
building, photo: Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic; Isuma
courtesy the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA; a
collective on the set of Nunaqpa (Going Inland), 1990, with,
crane removes the base of a Confederate monument in Forest
from left to right, Norman Cohn, Pauloosie Qulitalik, Lizzie
Park in St Louis, MO, on 27 June 2017, photo: Robert Cohen;
Qulitalik, Mary Qulitalik, Rachel Uyarashuk, Jonah
still from Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s music video Apeshit, 2018,
Uyarashuk, Zacharias Kunuk, courtesy Isuma; artist Wu Gan,
courtesy the artists; Banu Cennetoğlu’s installation The List
photo: Smileycharity, licensed under Creative Commons.
as part of the Liverpool Biennial after it is vandalised for the second time, courtesy the artist; part of the central section
pp 76–77 (January) Workers remove the statue of J. Marion
of the east frieze of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum,
Sims on 17 April 2018, New York, photo: Thomas Urbain/AFP/
London, photo: Yair Haklai, licensed under Creative Commons.
Getty Images; photodocumentation of Nan Goldin and P.A.I.N.’s anti-opioid protest in the Metropolitan Museum
pp 90–91 (July) A pitch invader, Croatia’s Ivan Strinic and
of Art’s Sackler Wing, New York, photo: Thomas Pavia,
France’s Kylian Mbappe during the France-Croatia World
courtesy Nan Goldin; ‘Shithole’ projection on the Trump
Cup final, Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow, 15 July 2018, photo:
Tower, New York, by Robin Bell, image via Twitter: @
Darren Staples/Reuters; protesters demand the Design
bellvisuals; Olu Oguibe’s obelisk Monument to Strangers and
Museum revise its funding policies, London, photo: Kristian
Refugees, 2017, installed on Kassel’s Königsplatz for
Buus; Katharina Cibulka, As long as the art market is a boys’ club
Documenta 14, with the inscription ‘I was a stranger and you
I want to be a feminist, 2018 (installation view), photo: Claudia
took me in’ written in German, English, Arabic and Turkish
Rohrauer, courtesy the artist and the Academy of Fine Arts,
(pictured), photo: Rabax63, licensed under Creative
Vienna.
Commons; Maurizio Cattelan, America, 2016 (installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 15 September 2016 – 15 September 2017), photo: Kristopher McKay.
. pp 94–95 (August) Members of Zubryce Mówimy Nie (Bison . Ladies, We Say No), 2018, courtesy Zubryce Mówimy Nie; posts documenting the demolition of Ai Weiwei’s Zuoyou
pp 78–79 (February) Kehinde Wiley, Barack Obama, 2018,
studio in Beijing, images via Instagram: @aiww; Nino Cais,
and Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018,
Sem título (Untitled), 2009, lambda print, 120 × 80 cm, courtesy
both courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro; Drop
Institution, Washington, DC; artist Parker Bright in front
the Shell performance at Van Gogh Museum, May 2017,
of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) at the Whitney Museum
photo: Laura Ponchel, courtesy Fossil Free Culture NL; man
of American Art, New York, March 2017, photo: Michael
spraypainting a golden statue of Turkish President Recep
Bilsborough; Fahmi Reza at a protest organised by Bersih,
Tayyip Erdogan, installed as part of the Wiesbaden Biennale,
or Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, in November 2016,
photo: Lukas Görlach.
photo: Azneal Ishak. pp 96–97 (September) Fire at the National Museum of Brazil,
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pp 80–81 (March) ‘New Proverbs’ signs by Badlands
Rio de Janeiro, photo: Felipe Milanez, licensed under
Unlimited, in support of the national student walkout
Creative Commons; Barbara Kruger, Untitled (No puedes vivir
against gun violence, March 2018, courtesy Badlands
sin nosotras / You Can’t Live Without Us), 2018, painted mural
Unlimited; Yayoi Kusama, LONGING FOR ETERNITY (2017),
at Silos de la Antigua Junta Nacional de Granos, Buenos Aires,
photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio, © the artist, courtesy
30 × 68 m; artist campaign protesting Cuba’s Law Decree 349,
David Zwirner, New York, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Singapore &
courtesy Cubalex; protesters contest the removal of works
Shanghai, and Victoria Miro, London & Venice; Jeremy Deller,
from the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Serralves
How to leave Facebook, 2018, courtesy Rapid Response Unit.
Museum in Porto, photo: Paulo Pimenta.
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The World on Paper September 27, 2018 – January 7, 2019 Daily except Tuesdays, 10 am – 7 pm Thursdays 10 am – 9 pm Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin db-palaispopulaire.com
I do an ordinary job In an ordinary way 103
Introduction Over the past year most people will have come to associate any mention of ‘power’ with a story about its abuse. And that’s because for some time, perhaps even for all time, power dynamics have been exploited by everything from species, races, nations, governments, associations and corporations, all the way down to individuals. There are so many examples of this at present that it would be hard to know where to start any catalogue of abuses, let alone to know where it might end. By now you might have the feeling that power is something with which no sane person would want to associate themselves. But influence still exists, and being influential (and hence having some degree of power) is not always a choice that you make; it is also something that happens to you as a result of how you and your works are perceived by others. On an individual level, power is about being able to do what you wish. On a societal level it’s about being able to do what you wish regardless of the wishes of others. Or, to put it less bluntly, to influence or control the behaviours of others (which is where abuse comes into the equation). On an ideal level it’s about making sure that the wishes of as many people as possible are accommodated. The first incorporates the ‘freedom of art’. The second incorporates the ‘power of art’ (to influence the attitudes and worldviews of those who encounter it). The third is an ideal upon which the discourse and debate around art is founded. While art has often been courted by the (few) powerful to legitimate their power, it has also been enlisted to acknowledge the presence of those (many) to whom power is denied. David Zwirner, for example, sits at the top of this list not just for his commercial acumen, not for a vision that is merely based on art’s econosystem, but also for the fact that he operates with a broader notion of art’s ecosystem, built on the values of the artists he represents. So, how do we define power in art in terms of the list? Well, it obviously incorporates defences and attacks on the principles just outlined. But on a practical level, it is boiled down to three main criteria. First, it’s about having an influence on the type of art being made today and the kind of themes it addresses (although, granted, in terms of that last category, you could just say the world). Next, it’s about being active: having done something over the past 12 months. Lastly, it’s about being influential on a global rather than a local scale. There are still more men than women on this list (58 percent to 42 percent), particularly in its upper reaches, and it is still not as ethnically and globally diverse as the frequently promoted idea of a ‘global artworld’ would suggest. This is a list of influence in art as it is, not an index of how ArtReview’s anonymous panel of selectors might wish it to be. It recognises that the art we are exposed to and that is promoted to us is often the product of a web of networked interests pushing a particular view of the world. Nevertheless, that there is both a desire and a force for change in the structure of the artworld, as much as there is in the structure of society at large, is acknowledged by the presence of the #MeToo movement near the top, and
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by the presence of artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker, and thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak and Simon Njami, who are seeking to diversify and expand the idea of contemporary art and its histories, while simultaneously highlighting its longer-term blindnesses. Their power, of course, is in part an acknowledgement that such efforts are a work in progress, even as museums and commercial galleries around the world begin to build up narratives of art history that include diverse genders, geographies, ethnicities and the historical contexts that generate these. It is for these reasons that ArtReview invited Kara Walker to contribute the artwork on the cover of this issue and those that punctuate the list that follows. The works come from the series Notes Drawn by a Negress After a Long Absence (2016), a set of 62 drawings in gouache, ink and graphite on paper. For ArtReview, these works disrupt the narratives of power that it attempts, otherwise dispassionately, to describe. More generally, Walker’s drawings, videos and collages are at once historically specific and, because the histories of racialised and gendered violence in the United States and across the world continue to erupt into the present day (however ‘contemporary’ we may think our lives are), depressingly timeless. Her work also illustrates one of the prevailing themes in this issue, namely art’s use of fictionalised narratives to bring to light buried histories, as well as the capacity to elicit shock and in doing so to undermine institutional forms of knowledge and the means by which they are enforced, interrogating versions of historical events based on assumptions around the fixity of the official narratives that often surround them. It is ArtReview’s hope that the work might offer a reminder that it is only by acknowledging and understanding the systems of power that structure our engagement with the world that we can hope effectively to change them. And it is ArtReview’s belief that art remains one of the best stages from which to fight the status quo. ArtReview
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Gallerist German Last Year 5 Zwirner’s gallery, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2018, boasts a half-billion-dollar annual turnover, a stable of more than 60 artists and estates, and locations from New York (three galleries) to London to Hong Kong, where a new 900sqm space opened in January. Not prepared to stop there, the dealer has announced plans for a new $50m five-storey gallery in New York, designed by starchitect Renzo Piano (the first commercial gallery by the Italian), for delivery in 2020. Zwirner needs all the exhibition space he can get: this year alone he took on Rose Wylie, Lucas Arruda, Josh Smith, Harold Ancart and the estates of Franz West, Roy DeCarava, Joan Mitchell and Diane Arbus (this last in collaboration with Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco). Longer-standing gallery artists, such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Kerry James Marshall and Yayoi Kusama (to name just those who feature on this list) continue to push boundaries and set new agendas for the role of art today. Such growth may have put Zwirner in a reflective mood – looking back on a quarter century that has seen the art market grow to a scale undreamed of in the early 1990s, and forward to a future he has the power to shape. Zwirner knows his decisions have consequences: when the subject of gallery giants whose size threatens to destabilise the art ecosystem was raised at an industry conference earlier this year, he proposed that art fairs ‘tax’ the biggest galleries in order to subsidise the participation of the smaller ones. A few months later, Art Basel announced just such a policy. This wasn’t merely abstract musing on the part of the gallerist – when plans for Zwirner’s Hong Kong gallery were announced last autumn, it turned out that dynamic young gallerist Leo Xu would close his own six-year-old gallery, Leo Xu Projects, to head up Zwirner’s Hong Kong operation.
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‘Artists want you to stay small; they hate when stuff changes,’ Zwirner said in January, asking, perhaps rhetorically, ‘how do you keep it intimate while being able to compete in the increasingly competitive art market?’ How to square that circle has depended on Zwirner’s careful attention to keeping the focus on the artists and their work, while assiduously navigating their reputations through the increasingly turbulent and ever-deepening waters of the global art system. It’s perhaps why, even when Franz West left him in 2001 for Gagosian (West was the artist who inaugurated Zwirner’s first gallery, in 1993), the artist’s estate returned to the Zwirner fold this year. And nurturing art-historical legacies is as important as steering current careers: when the estate of Anni Albers (together with husband Josef’s) came to Zwirner in 2016, the pioneering textile artist (who died in 1994) had been all but forgotten. Since last year, retrospectives of Anni Albers’s work have opened at the Guggenheim Bilbao and Tate Modern. Besides all that, the gallery is now operating an expansive publishing arm, and not of the type solely dedicated to boosting the careers of those in whom the gallery has a vested commercial interest (though it does that too). Headed by Zwirner’s son, Lucas, David Zwirner Books’ recent publications have included Jarrett Earnest’s portrait of the state of art criticism (a series of interviews with prominent critics titled What it Means to Write About Art), Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s tribute to ordinary people (The Sweet Flypaper of Life), Donald Shambroom’s account of Marcel Duchamp’s final hours (Duchamp’s Last Day) and a reprint of John Ruskin’s 1860 analysis of Giotto’s Arena Chapel (Giotto and His Works in Padua). All of which puts Zwirner in a position to raise the bar for what a commercial gallery can be, how it can operate and how it might integrate with the broader, changing artworld of today.
ArtReview
1 Photo: Jason Schmidt. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York, London & Hong Kong
1 David Zwirner
2 © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 3 © Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 4 Photo: Trevor Paglen
3 #MeToo Activist Movement International NEW
2 Kerry James Marshall Artist American Last Year 68 The Chicago-based artist may have hit the headlines this year for the $21.1m paid at auction for his painting Past Times (1997) – a record for a living black artist – but it is his personal campaign to counter the whitewashing of art history by populating it with black bodies – to make history by painting that history – that has proved influential. With his groundbreaking exhibition Mastry receding in rearview, this summer saw a new survey show launch at the Rennie Museum in Vancouver and the unveiling of A Monumental Journey, a nine-metrehigh sculpture commemorating the founding (in 1925) of the National Bar Association (the oldest association of African-American attorneys in the US) in Des Moines, Iowa. At the time of writing, the Chicago Public Library has just consigned Marshall’s Knowledge and Wonder (1995) to auction with an estimate of $10–15m to contribute to library improvements and a public-art fund.
Many of the year’s most dramatic shifts in power within the artworld can be traced to a popular protest against its abuse. #MeToo went viral amidst accusations levelled at movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in October 2017 and has, in the intervening 12 months, provided an umbrella beneath which diverse protests against sexual misconduct in the workplace have gathered. In the artworld, these include We Are Not Surprised, formed in the wake of claims against Artforum copublisher Knight Landesman, and anonymous handle @herdsceneand, which in October published allegations causing Riyas Komu, cofounder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, to step down. Beyond high-profile resignations – and there were many more – #MeToo changed the prevailing climate in which curators are appointed, prizes awarded and exhibitions framed. While much more remains to be done, #MeToo’s most significant legacy may be to have pioneered a model by which power is made accountable to those excluded from it, whether by virtue of gender identity, ability, race, class or any number of other intersecting factors.
4 Hito Steyerl Artist German Last Year 1 When Steyerl exhibited alongside Martha Rosler at Kunstmuseum Basel in May, the pairing made instinctive sense. Both are format-agnostic discerners of links between politics and mass media, exposers of invisible structures of influence and subjugation. Lecturing at Yale this year, Steyerl characterised virtual reality platforms as ‘a training scheme to adapt humans to a world from which they are increasingly missing… replaced by invisible systems or automation or robot’. It’s the sort of prognostication that keeps Steyerl’s book Duty Free Art (2016) on nightstands. Steyerl didn’t exhibit much in 2018; despite topping this list last year, her natural mode is gadfly. Nevertheless, she joined Esther Schipper’s starry roster in June and her first installation since 2016 is on view at Turin’s Castello di Rivoli. The work centres on neural sound recordings, looking into surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence while implicating the institution; art, Steyerl has long demonstrated, is part of our blighted moment’s mesh of problems.
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6 Iwan & Manuela Wirth
Artist Chinese Last Year 13
Gallerists Swiss Last Year 7
This summer, when Beijing authorities began razing Ai’s studio and his assistants scrambled to remove his work, he went straight on Instagram to update his half-million followers. Aware of his sizeable audience, Ai is nowadays as much sociopolitical commentator as artist – his drone-assisted documentary on the migrant crisis, Human Flow (2017), was shortlisted for Best Documentary at this year’s Oscars – though he’s not neglecting his traditional broadcasting channel, art galleries. This autumn he debuted in Los Angeles with a trio of shows at venues including one run by Hollywood’s United Talent Agency (in whose design he had a hand); this installation, titled Cao/Humanity, centred on a lawn of marble blades of grass – typically late-Ai in being a master-crafted massing of individual units. Right now he seems at a crossroads, having recently decided to leave his adopted city of Berlin for upstate New York. At a moment when many people would like to leave America, Ai is returning: maybe he’s decided it needs him.
Hauser & Wirth recently continued their marriage of hospitality and art (the pair are currently refurbishing a hotel in Scotland) by announcing a new gallery in the Swiss ski resort of St Moritz. This year, however, was about their eighth space, in Hong Kong, which was inaugurated by a show of Mark Bradford in March. The global real estate helps in the gallery’s never-ending race for new artists: Charles Gaines, Amy Sherald (fresh from completing the official portrait of Michelle Obama) and Zeng Fanzhi (who held simultaneous shows in Zürich, London and Hong Kong) joined the stable. Estates are also big business for the duo, and they struck deals with the descendants of Eduardo Chillida, Alina Szapocznikow and Günther Förg. All of which gives them the cash to take risks: be it supporting Christoph Büchel’s controversial bid to preserve the prototypes of Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall as national monuments, or staging a show of collector Sylvio Perlstein’s entire holdings.
7 Hans Ulrich Obrist
8 Thelma Golden
Curator Swiss Last Year 6
Museum Director American Last Year 8
If curating is all about connecting artists to institutions, with a big dose of talking, then the Serpentine Galleries’ artistic director, who celebrated his 50th birthday this year, is its paragon. Not content with hosting the Serpentine’s ‘talks marathon’ in October, the airmile-busting Obrist went stateside with a mini ‘interview marathon’ during EXPO Chicago. His cocurated show, inspired by philosophers Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant, opened at New York’s Americas Society not long after Obrist was announced as senior programme adviser to the city’s ambitious Shed arts centre. And if one Serpentine Pavilion was not enough (London’s 2018 commission by Frida Escobedo), Obrist headed east to open another, in Beijing (by Liu Jiakun). And he continued his close involvement with Maja Hoffmann’s LUMA centre in Arles, where he put on (with Daniel Birnbaum) a retrospective of Gilbert & George ahead of the vast site’s eventual opening in 2020.
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Last year, Golden, director and chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, unveiled plans for the museum’s new David Adjaye-designed home, to open in 2021, announcing 70 percent of the $175m project’s funds already promised. Still a fair bit of cash to bring in, then, but it’s a mark of the influence and goodwill that Golden enjoys among successive generations of artists that a fundraising auction in New York (including works donated by Mark Bradford, Julie Mehrutu and Glenn Ligon) could raise a further $20m in just two days in May. And it’s indicative of the faith in Golden’s commitment to the history and present of the work of artists of African descent that, in October, the museum was bequeathed 400 works from the collection of arts patron and civil rights activist Peggy Cooper Cafritz – a substantial addition to the museum’s collection of 2,200 works.
ArtReview
5 Photo : Gao Yuan 6 Photo: Hugo Ritsson Thomas. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth 7 Photo: Kate Berry 8 Photo: Julie Skarratt
5 Ai Weiwei
9 Photo: Paul Stuart for New Scientist 10 Photo: Lamont Hamilton 11 Photo: Mike Wolff / Der Tagesspiegel 12 Photo: Ola Rindal
9 Eyal Weizman
10 Fred Moten
Architect Israeli Last Year 94
Philosopher American NEW
With the nomination of Forensic Architecture for this year’s Turner Prize, artist/architect/author/professor Weizman can be said to have shifted the centre of gravity in the artworld. The research-based, deeply politicised work he’s been doing for years – and figures he’s trained at London’s Goldsmiths, such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan – now sits close to the artistic mainstream, and the practice of Forensic Architecture, the 15-strong group of architects, investigative journalists and diverse experts that he masterminds, is the rare type that has tangible real-world effects. This spring, as FA’s exhibition opened at the ICA in London, Weizman was also in the midst of 3D-modelling work on the tragic fire that devastated London’s Grenfell Tower at the request of the local community – working with crowd-sourced video footage against fake news and governmental spin – which admirably demonstrates where his priorities lie. As he told the Evening Standard, ‘Our aim is to win cases not art prizes’.
Moten’s writing is an acknowledged influence on artists including Arthur Jafa, Glenn Ligon, Sondra Perry and Theaster Gates, with whom he shares a need to celebrate the radical traditions and rearticulate the contemporary experience of black Americans. His most widely read text is The Undercommons (2013), a collection of essays cowritten with Stefano Harvey that critiques academia and proposes, among other things, that ‘talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering’ be recognised as intellectual activity. Moten opens up the field of knowledge by entangling different practices and cultures – his discursive lyrical style shifting in the blink of an eye from Charles Mingus to Hannah Arendt to David Hammons – and so the form as well as the content deliver one of his key messages: that blackness is resistant, ‘fugitive’ and irreducible to a fixed category. It’s unsurprising then that he writes beautifully on jazz: describing disruptive patterns, making improvisatory connections and imagining a world reordered through the senses.
11 Wolfgang Tillmans
12 Pierre Huyghe
Artist German Last Year 11
Artist French Last Year 2
The New Yorker called Tillmans an ‘artistic statesman’ in a September profile. Certainly the photographer, who made his name capturing queer youth culture during the 1990s, has become something of an icon. The expansion of his global fanbase is helped by a relentless exhibition schedule (ten solo shows this year, including an African tour that stopped at museums in Kinshasa, Nairobi and Johannesburg) and the fact that many of the places to which he travels are captured in the work. His creative spirit is just as restless: this year he designed sets for the English National Opera’s staging of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and released Source, an experimental noise single that follows last year’s full-length album. Though less directly engaged in politics than in 2016–17 (when he campaigned furiously against Brexit and the far-right in Germany), Tillmans did release a book that questions why people remain committed to an opinion when all evidence points to the contrary.
Huyghe’s recent work operates on timescales, and is created through processes, that test the limits of human understanding. He typically achieves this by incorporating elements beyond the artist’s control into constructed ecosystems, eg a garden pollinated by bees. At the end of a year that saw his first solo show in China (at Pond Society, Shanghai), Huyghe’s new exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, London, combines human, artificial and animal intelligences. LED screens show images generated by the attempts of a deep-learning network to reconstruct a mental image by measuring a human’s brain activity. The screens are speckled with flies born into the gallery, while their dead conspecifics litter the floor, their experience of the world limited to the exhibition. If the title – UUmwelt, which nods to his 2011 work Umwelt, shown that year at Esther Schipper, Berlin – suggests Huyghe has spent the year developing a theme rather than breaking new ground, then it’s one with infinite possible variations.
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14 David Hammons
Museum Director American Last Year 17
Artist American Last Year 19
When the sixty-six-year-old director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art expresses an opinion, the artworld takes note. So Lowry’s comments in January on the merits of deaccessioning (that’s ‘selling off’, in non-museum speak) artworks to enable new purchases were widely remarked on. How you get the best out of the art in your care must preoccupy the head of a museum whose collection numbers some 200,000 artworks. So as MoMA undergoes a $450m refurbishment and extension, to open next year, the MoMA collection has been on the road – 200 ‘masterworks’ headed to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, late last year, a similar number headed for Melbourne’s NGV in June. And steering such a big beast has its conflicts: in August, management settled a long-running dispute over pay and benefits with its unionised workers (with accusations of stinginess amid all the wealth), while Klaus Biesenbach, head of MoMA’s PS1 outpost, announced he was heading for LA.
However clearly David Hammons states his disdain for the artworld (‘the worst audience in the world’), the feeling is not reciprocated. He is confirmed among the world’s most expensive artists – the relative scarcity of his work means that major pieces rarely come up for auction, but the expectation is that if one did, it would break records – and these days the reclusive trickster is perilously close to joining the ranks of elder statesmen. The New York State Senate this year passed legislation permitting construction of a monumental public artwork by Hammons that would jut into the Hudson River opposite the Whitney; on the basis of a conversation with Hammons, Mnuchin Gallery initiated the first major exhibition of Ed Clark in New York since 1980 (Hammons owns one of the largest collections of the veteran abstract painter). Hammons has for decades sought to reshape the ways that art is made, sold and written into history; the question is whether he is now willing to work from the inside.
15 Michael Govan
16 Yayoi Kusama
Museum Director American Last Year 36
Artist Japanese Last Year 55
While still fundraising for the $650m rebuild of the museum (due 2019), Govan relentlessly cultivates philanthropists on the West Coast and beyond. The museum has partnered with Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur Budi Tek to create a new foundation, to which Tek will donate his vast Chinese art collection. The LACMA collection is already rich with Asian art: this year it was gifted one of the biggest collections of contemporary ink paintings in the world. Meanwhile progress was made towards the establishment of a satellite museum in South Los Angeles for the benefit of what Govan described as demographics ‘underserved’ by culture. The stated determination to reflect different perspectives (though the exhibition programme this year featured the likes of David Hockney and Mark Grotjahn) was given weight by Govan’s announcement, in May, that LACMA was collaborating with Arizona State University on a programme to establish a more diverse generation of curators.
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In September The Observer asked whether Kusama is the ‘the world’s favourite artist’. She is certainly loved enough that rogue curators in China counterfeit shows: at least six popped up this year, according to the artist’s lawyers. It is easy to see why frauds might view her as a route to an easy buck: the artist’s genuine shows are blockbuster affairs – five museum exhibitions in 2018, including a homecoming gig at the Matsumoto City Museum – with even commercial galleries ticketing entry (an exhibition at Victoria Miro London booked out within the first few days). And Kusama is obviously a market favourite, being one of the world’s most expensive living female artists (though an Untitled ‘egg carton relief ’ from 1962, with an estimate of $7–10 million, failed to sell at Sotheby’s in May). If you couldn’t afford a work, and missed out on tickets, then there is always this year’s feature-length documentary to see at the cinema.
ArtReview
13 Photo: Peter Ross 15 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 16 Yayoi Kusama, With All My Love for The Tulips, I Pray Forever, 2012 (installation view, National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2012). © the artist.Courtesy David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts,Tokyo, Singapore & Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOIKUSAMA Inc
13 Glenn D. Lowry
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17 Maria Balshaw
18 Nan Goldin
Museum Director British Last Year 16
Artist American NEW
19 Adam D. Weinberg
20 Miuccia Prada
Museum Director American Last Year 12
Collector Italian Last Year 33
Protests at the Whitney are starting to feel like a permanent installation, which may explain why Weinberg’s museum is getting better at handling them. When ACT UP New York picketed David Wojnarowicz’s ‘big, rich retrospective’ (as The New York Times lauded it) for historicising the artist and AIDS activist, thus ignoring the continued impact of the disease, the museum amended the wall texts and invited protesters back in to assist in presenting the additional interpretation. Art by fellow AIDS activists Gran Fury was among the 417 works acquired by the Whitney in the past year, a haul soon to be swelled by the Roy Lichtenstein estate’s promise of 400 more. Art by American greats travelled to Rome for the Whitneycurated exhibition Pollock and the New York School at the Complesso del Vittoriano, while New York was treated to a retrospective of work by Zoe Leonard and, with the presentation of fashion designers Eckhaus Latta, the museum’s first fashion focus since a Warhol show in 1997.
The communist-mime-artist-turned-fashion-grand-dame – now worth $3.3 billion – believes artworlders could learn from their counterparts in design: ‘How to be more appealing’, for example. ‘Culture should be attractive, otherwise no one listens,’ she told Vogue this year. The Fondazione Prada, which has occupied a former distillery in Milan since 2015, was this year completed by a newly opened ‘torre’ designed by OMA; the giant mushrooms by Carsten Höller that welcomed visitors three years ago were eyecatching as well. Yet Prada’s institution, under the curatorship of Germano Celant, is far from just fizz-bang-wallop art: Post Zang Tumb Tuuum, a vast and critically lauded survey of Italian art from the Futurist to the Fascist era, showcased its intellectual credentials. Tapping Dieter Roelstraete to curate a show at Prada’s Venice space on questions of exile, escape and retreat, drawing on Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein as reference points, doesn’t hurt either.
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17 Photo: Hugo Glendinning 19 Photo: Scott Rudd 20 Photo: Guido Harari
The influence of the artist behind The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985) is undiminished, especially when so much art of late explores themes that play out in Goldin’s photography: identity, feelings, community, mental health, degradation. Yet the archetypal New York downtown artist enters this list not only for her artmaking – which featured in a solo show at the Château d’Hardelot, Condette, and with Diana Arbus and Brassaï at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, this year – but also for her battle with the Sackler family, giants of arts patronage. Goldin, who suffered opioid addiction after being prescribed the painkiller OxyContin, accuses Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the Sacklers, of an aggressive marketing campaign leading to the death of more than 200,000 people (the Sackler family and the company deny the allegation). Goldin, in recovery, has a new drive: in September Marian Goodman announced that the artist had joined the gallery’s ranks.
Balshaw’s first full year as director of the four Tate galleries did not pass without a hitch. Patron Anthony d’Offay was accused of sexual harassment, a major headache given he sold his collection to the Tate at cost in 2008 to found the Artist Rooms touring project (Tate has cut ties with the collector, who denies the allegations). In February, Balshaw was accused of ‘victim blaming’ over comments on #MeToo and was criticised for her description of young boys ‘eating their fried chicken’ in front of a Steve McQueen work at Tate Liverpool. Things perked up a little as the Tate St Ives extension opened in October, yet there was a 3.3 percent fall in visits across the UK compared to 2016/17. Nonetheless, Tate’s global brand remains strong: 615,000 people saw Landscapes of the Mind: Masterpieces from Tate Britain (1700–1980) at the Shanghai Museum in August, making it Tate’s most attended show.
22 Larry Gagosian
21 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
Gallerist American Last Year 15
Gallerists German Last Year 20
21 Photo: Robbie Lawrence 22 Photo: Roe Ethridge, 2018. Courtesy Gagosian 24 Photo: Art Basel
If more women artists are beginning to get their due, then Sprüth and Magers can claim some credit for smoothing the path. ‘Right now there is a feeding frenzy,’ Magers noted this year. ‘Art by under-recognised female artists becomes a section of the market.’ Sprüth Magers’s roster is only 30 percent female – about industry average – with exhibitions this year for John Bock, Gary Hume, Thomas Demand and Frank Stella across their galleries in Berlin, London and Los Angeles. Yet the duo championed the likes of Kara Walker, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer way before the current trend. They still seem committed to supporting women artists whose work challenges the established structures of power; this year, in Berlin, Senga Nengudi staged her first exhibition with the gallery, showing works from her series of performative sculptures that use pantyhose as a tensile symbol of female resistance.
Gagosian, now seventy-two, may want to start thinking about his legacy: his 16 galleries worldwide turn over $1bn, and his personal collection is reputedly worth a similar amount. Gagosian’s roster includes legends such as Ed Ruscha (lauded with four international retrospectives this year) and art celebrities such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Legacy aside, Gagosian is still very much in the cut-and-thrust of blue-chip dealing, battling lawsuits (two collectors suing this year for Koons sculptures they claim they paid for years ago, still undelivered) and hosting A-list openings (Hirst’s Beverly Hills show sold out to a crowd that included Kanye West and Tom Ford) while experimenting with ways to keep expanding the business. Having previously invested in online platform Artsy, Gagosian launched his own pop-up online viewing room during Art Basel, with sales advisers online 24/7. Legacy? He’ll get back to you…
23 Paul B. Preciado
24 Marc Spiegler
Philosopher Spanish NEW
Art Fair Director American-French Last Year 24
The artworld’s turn towards sexual politics, gender identity and the ‘queering’ of its discourses and histories has been accompanied by the rise in influence of philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado. Author of Contrassexual Manifesto (2000), Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics (2008) and Pornotopia (2010), he worked as director of the Independent Studies Programme at MACBA, Barcelona, before taking on Documenta 14’s ‘Parliament of Bodies’ public programme. It initially drew fire from all sides – for the unrepentantly leftist tone of Preciado’s inaugural text, from those who questioned what performance symposia had to do with art, and from others who argued that the Athens-based part of the programme might address local crises rather than technology and consciousness, anticolonialism and queerness. But amid a recent slew of sprawling researchbased exhibitions and crossovers between art and activism, Preciado’s approach appears not only justified but agenda-setting.
‘Art Basel Is Coming to Save Your City’, announced Bloomberg Businessweek in September. The Cities programme, which premiered in Buenos Aires, is a new venture by the art fair juggernaut, in which they organise some art projects and fly in a load of VIPs and press. The city pays for the privilege ($2.1m has been cited), national economic woes notwithstanding. Press reports from international media were blandly celebratory, but one local collector said the initiative merely ‘brought smoke’. Perhaps the more radical move for Spiegler this year, then, was within Art Basel’s core business. Following an initial suggestion by David Zwirner, and in consultation with other blue-chip dealers, Spiegler introduced a form of progressive taxation to the fairs in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami with a sliding scale for booth fees, as well as other discounts, offset by rising fees for the biggest galleries.
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25 Massimiliano Gioni
26 Gavin Brown
Curator Italian Last Year 22
Gallerist British Last Year 10
27 Marian Goodman
28 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Gallerist American Last Year 18
Collector Venezuelan Last Year 27
Goodman, whose galleries straddle New York, Paris and London, celebrated both her ninetieth birthday this year and the fortieth anniversary of her commercial empire. Goodman has not played the roster-expansion game so beloved of other blue chips, yet in 2015 hers was one of five galleries whose artists made up 30 percent of US museum shows. To be fair, managing the likes of Tacita Dean (who had simultaneous shows across London’s National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy this year), Pierre Huyghe (with a solo show at the Serpentine) and Gerhard Richter (four survey shows across Germany) is handful enough. The dealer did, however, take on worldwide representation of Nan Goldin this year – something of a coup given the photographer’s prominence as an antiopioid activist – and open her first show of Kemang Wa Lehulere, whose recent signing complements the gallery’s South African contingent of William Kentridge and the late David Goldblatt.
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Brown continues to occupy a rare position in New York’s art scene: his gallery boasts big names and presumably a pretty good dollar turnover while maintaining its hipster credentials. Across the Grand Street and Harlem spaces he staged spring shows by critical darlings such as Arthur Jafa, Frances Stark and Avery Singer; the summer group show touched on sex, drugs and the Industrial Revolution (including work by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Amalia Ulman and Nil Yalter); and in the autumn Rob Pruitt (showing new quilt works) and Rirkrit Tiravanija took a floor each uptown. With all this going on, Brown and Tiravanija continued their Unclebrother restaurant-gallery project in the Catskill Mountains, while the gallery’s programming in its Rome space ticked over. One less thing Brown had to worry about though was 356 Mission. The LA nonprofit gallery he cofounded with artist Laura Owens and bookseller Wendy Yao, which was repeatedly targeted by antigentrification protests, closed in May.
Despite Venezuela’s troubles, the collector’s foundation continues its calendar of residencies, screenings and discussions in Caracas. Yet the power of Patty – as she is known – lies not in programming, but lending (to, for example in February, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm). Patty has also continued her habit of not asking for the work back, with a donation of 202 works shared between MoMA (where she is a trustee, one of many such positions she holds globally), Museo de Arte de Lima, the Reina Sofía, the Bronx Museum, the Blanton and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. An earlier gift of 83 works to the Blanton has been touring the US and Peru this year, and in February Inés Katzenstein took up the inaugural directorship of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute at MoMA, established from a 2016 donation of 102 works. Much of all this is overseen by collection director Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, who curated this year’s São Paulo Biennial – albeit to scant acclaim.
ArtReview
25 Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Scott Rudd 27 Photo: Thomas Struth
Walking through Strange Days at The Store X in London – a greatest hits from the New Museum’s recent programme – one recognises Gioni’s ability to tap the right artist at the right time. Among the used-to-be-emerging-but-since-established stars to have occupied the New York institution are Ed Atkins, Cheng Ran, Camille Henrot, Ragnar Kjartansson, Cally Spooner and Wu Tsang. The big attraction stateside this year, however, was an artist of vintage, Sarah Lucas, one of the few YBAs still garnering critical love. Over in Milan, at Gioni’s second job, as artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, things were quiet: the staging of Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege, the artist’s 2004 inflatable Stonehenge, can’t have occupied too much time. Instead Gioni was busy over the past 12 months acting as judge on the juries of the Vilcek Prize (won by Nari Ward), Kurt Schwitters Prize (Mika Rottenberg), BMW Art Journey Award (Jamal Cyrus) and Edvard Munch Award (Kerstin Brätsch).
29 Photo: Kris Graves 30 Photo: Julian Salinas 31 Photo: Todd Eberle 32 Photo: Jack Hems
29 Marc Glimcher
30 Theaster Gates
Gallerist American Last Year 21 (with Arne Glimcher)
Artist American Last Year 23
‘The cult of the personality has shifted, and galleries have become institutions,’ Glimcher noted this year, the first in which he appears on this list without his father, Arne, founder of Pace gallery. The institution in this case has spaces in New York, Palo Alto, London, Geneva, Beijing, Hong Kong and Seoul, and just took on artists William Monk and Mary Corse (in Asia only), and the estate of Vito Acconci (in an unusual partnership with Art Agency, Partners, a division of Sotheby’s). Yet artist representation is only one facet of the job when you are this big. To this end FuturePace, a partnership with public realm commissioning agency FutureCity, has been busy proliferating the work of Pace artists, including a commission for London’s new Crossrail by Michal Rovner and an ‘immersive, 20-tonne installation’ for the Eden Project botanic garden, by Studio Swine.
Gates’s tricksterish work combines sculpture, performance, community projects and urbanism with the aim of effecting practical change. The sale of objects, often crafted from the detritus of city life and resembling modernist abstract sculptures or paintings, partially funds the regeneration of the artist’s native South Side Chicago through his Rebuild Foundation, which purchases disused buildings and refurbishes them as community centres, including housing for artists and an archive of black American music. In February he staged a show of Ebony and Jet magazines, the archives of which the artist owns, in the building of their former publisher. If Gates sometimes is gaming the international artworld, using the wealth of its collectors to fix infrastructural problems that the local and federal governments have failed to address, then a major exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel this year, which travelled to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, provided further institutional recognition.
31 Bernard Arnault
32 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty
Collector French Last Year 28 Only four years after Arnault opened the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, it has become known for ambitious blockbuster shows that outpace the visitor numbers to the French capital’s more established museums. Last autumn the CEO of the LVMH group, and Europe’s richest man, convinced New York’s MoMA to lend over 200 masterpieces (by Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp and Yvonne Rainer, among others) for a show that attracted over 750,000 visitors, and the current twin retrospectives of twentiethcentury (albeit from opposite ends) enfants terribles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Egon Schiele, will likely prove popular too. Footfall is a bit quieter at Arnault’s other art spaces, one suspects, although their more contemporary programmes lend something of an edge to the foundation’s otherwise art-historical focus, this year staging solo shows by artists including Sophie Calle, Philippe Parreno and Ian Cheng across the Munich, Beijing and Venice spaces, respectively.
Gallerists British Last Year 25 The Lisson trio do things differently than their big-beast peers: ‘We’re not going to have a gallery in every city,’ Logsdail Sr has noted, ‘like a sailor who has a friend in every port’. Instead, ticking things over at their four spaces (two in London, two in New York), they announced painter (and Royal Academy president) Christopher Le Brun would be joining ship, alongside fellow 2018 recruit, sculptor Hugh Hayden. ‘Quiet’, of course, is a relative term when you have Ai Weiwei (opened his largest show ever, in São Paulo), John Akomfrah (first US survey, at New York’s New Museum) and Christian Jankowski (filled a Berlin auction house with fakes) to contend with. Nor have they shied away from backing their artists in a fight, supporting Haroon Mirza’s plagiarism battle with Louis Vuitton and Anish Kapoor’s copyright tiff with the National Rifle Association.
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34 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto
Museum Director French Last Year 26
Gallerists Mexican / Colombian Last Year 37
Despite a difficult critical reception, Macel’s edition of the Venice Biennale closed to record visitor numbers last November. Back at her day job as chief curator of Paris’s Centre Pompidou, Macel and her team were busy trying to revive the spirit of May 68 with three weeks of debate, screenings and student workshops, as well as staging shows for César, Sheila Hicks and a much-anticipated retrospective of work by the late Franz West. To balance out this Eurocentric programme, the institution hosted an exhibition by Malaysian modernist painter Latiff Mohidin in collaboration with the National Gallery Singapore, while its Metz counterpart turned to Japan with three exhibitions earlier this year, including a solo devoted to Kyoto-based experimental collective Dumb Type. Such partnerships reflect the institution’s increasingly internationalist ambition: while its Málaga outpost presented a Jean Dubuffet retrospective this July, its David Chipperfield-designed Shanghai building is slated to open next year.
The duo behind Mexico’s most prominent gallery have spent a lot of time out of the country this year (not just selling at art fairs, or merely supporting the careers of the gallery’s artists, which include Central American stars such as Damián Ortega and Gabriel Orozco, as well as international artists such as Haegue Yang and Rirkrit Tiravanija). They went to London, where the couple staged Signals: If You Like I Shall Grow at Thomas Dane Gallery, an exhibition that remembered the seminal British gallery whose experimental approach during the 1960s is a major influence on Kuri and Manzutto, and in May, to New York, where they opened a new outpost. They inaugurated it with a show by Abraham Cruzvillegas (in May, around the same time the Mexico City space was hosting New York’s White Columns, as part of the Condo Mexico gallery exchange), which they followed with a summer reading room (books, plants and hammocks), and a display of protest posters from May 68 in the autumn.
35 François Pinault
36 Pamela J. Joyner
Collector French Last Year 35
Collector American NEW
The luxury goods magnate, and France’s third-richest man, is worth $29bn, some of which he spends on art, adding anything between 100 and 500 works to his 3,000-strong collection annually. Then there’s the ongoing conversion of the former Paris stock exchange into a private museum that must be paid for. Pinault, the major shareholder of Christie’s auction house, is shelling out for the Tadao Ando-designed renovation, with the new institution set to open next year. In the meantime, while his Venetian palazzi showed Albert Oehlen and a themed show about self-representation, works from the collection were shown at the Couvent des Jacobins in Toulouse and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. Pinault also found pocket money to sponsor the restoration of Victor Hugo’s former residence, Hauteville House, on the isle of Guernsey to the tune of €3m.
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Joyner is, via the collection she initiated, the most prominent among a new breed of ‘activist’ collectors. That is to say that the collection, which has a main focus on African-American art from the 1940s to today, aims at achieving an end rather than displaying a personal taste. ‘The mission is to rewrite art history’, she told Sotheby’s earlier this year. To rewrite it acknowledging the heretofore underrecognised contribution of the global African diaspora. To that end Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection (Fred J. Giuffrida is her husband) opened a six-venue tour of US museums at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans this past January. Tate’s Soul of a Nation, to which Joyner made a significant contribution (in January she also began a five-year term as chair of the Tate Americas Foundation), also continued to travel the US. In her spare time Joyner is also a member of the board of the Art Institute of Chicago and of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and a setter-up of artist residencies.
ArtReview
33 Photo: JC Planchet 34 Photo: Pia Riverola 35 Photo: Matteo De Fina 36 Pamela J. Joyner seated in front of William T. Williams’s Eastern Star, 1971. Photo: Nathanael Turner
33 Christine Macel
37 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi
38 Maja Hoffmann
Curator Emirati Last Year 41
Collector Swiss Last Year 31
37 Photo: Nato Welton 38 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh 39 Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong 40 Photo: Cesare de Giglio
An off-year for Hoor’s Sharjah Biennial offers no rest for the polyglot Sheikha. First there is the annual March Meeting she organises, which this year took the title ‘Active Forms’ to explore modes of political resistance, and brought together speakers such as John Akomfrah, Shilpa Gupta and Rasheed Araeen. Then there’s the ongoing exhibition programme at the Sharjah Foundation, which this year featured exhibitions by Guyana-born British artist Frank Bowling and Kuwaiti Ala Younis, and a new permanent installation (housed in a specially built gallery) of Random International’s ever-crowd-pleasing Rain Room (2012). Yet Hoor’s attention also stretched beyond the foundation this year with the reopening of the city’s Africa Hall in September, a forerunner to the Africa Institute that is being built next door. Offering an MA course and PhD supervision, as well as conferences, symposia, lectures, film screenings and theatre, this new initiative takes African and African diaspora studies as its raison d’être.
Ten years since Hoffmann envisioned Luma Arles and four years after ground was broken on her $175m cultural complex (variously designed by Frank Gehry and Selldorf Architects), it still isn’t quite finished. But while the opening has been put back to spring 2020, the Swiss collector/philanthropist/film producer has been busy as ever, remaining on the boards of Tate, the Serpentine, the New Museum, Kunsthalle Zürich (and more) and serving as chairwoman of the Swiss Institute, while this year her Luma Westbau in Zürich tilted judiciously towards issues of race and gender with shows by Sondra Perry, Arthur Jafa and Women’s History Museum among others. Meanwhile, Hoffmann’s Marfa-of-Provence continues to stealthily grow. Summer saw the opening of her second boutique hotel in Arles, L’Arlatan – designed by artist Jorge Pardo and incorporating a residency programme – while in the Luma Atelier, scientists tinker with the area’s iconic sunflowers. Powered by Hoffmann’s ambition, art’s expanded field is going city-scale.
39 Jay Jopling
40 Ralph Rugoff
Gallerist British Last Year 47
Museum Director American Reentry (73 in 2010)
Jopling’s White Cube continues its resurgence after a period marked by lingering associations with the British artists who came to prominence during the 1990s. This is reflected in an increasingly international and critically engaged exhibitions programme: the gallery has recently hosted artists including Beatriz Milhazes, He Xiangyu, Seung-taek Lee and Minjung Kim across its two spaces in London and its outpost in Hong Kong. This last remains the gallery’s only location outside the UK, though the intention to make inroads into the US market was signalled by the recruitment from Sotheby’s of Eric Shiner as artistic director of the New York office, which opened this year, and an offsite project during Art Basel Miami Beach. In September it was announced that the estate of hard-edge American painter Al Held (1928–2005) would be represented by the gallery, picking up on a trend among blue-chip galleries that has become increasingly pronounced over the past year.
This year the Hayward Gallery celebrated its 50th anniversary (and Rugoff’s 12th as its director) after reopening in January following a two-year renovation. The celebrations were not seriously disrupted by the spontaneous combustion of rotting fish during the installation of Lee Bul’s summer retrospective, but the following group exhibition, Space Shifters, better exemplified the crowd-pleasing spectacularism that is, depending on who and what you believe, Rugoff’s defining strength or weakness. Either way, it is presumed that those qualities will shape his artistic direction of the 2019 Venice Biennale, to which he owes his reentry onto this list. In his curatorial statement for the biennial, titled May You Live in Interesting Times, Rugoff proposed that art ‘does not exercise its forces in the domain of politics’ but can ‘perhaps’ serve as ‘a kind of guide for how to live and think’. Which itself sounds, in these interesting times, like a political position.
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42 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Artist Chinese NEW
Philosopher Indian NEW
‘No young artist has a sharper view of the future than Cao Fei,’ wrote The New York Times’s Jason Farago on seeing the Beijing-based artist’s new commission Asia One (2018) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York this summer. The film tackles the red-hot topic of automated manufacturing and robot labour. This past November, the subject was enhanced reality when Cao’s BMW art car raced for the first time in Macao. Survey exhibitions of Cao’s work took place this year in Hong Kong (the first solo exhibition at the newly opened Tai Kwan Centre for Heritage and the Arts) and Düsseldorf’s K21 (a reiteration of Cao’s widely praised 2016 show at MoMA PS1), tracing the impact of everything from cosplay and Second Life to urban development and the blurry distinctions between work and play. All of which has demonstrated that Cao is very much leading the way in raising the key issues of tomorrow’s society today.
Among the world’s leading postcolonial intellectuals, Spivak has long preached an ‘interventionist’ criticism that moves beyond academic enclosures and into wider society. The cofounder of Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the first translator of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) into English, she uses deconstructive methodologies to critique imperialist, phallocentric and bourgeois histories. However recondite that sounds, the point is to break up the structures of power in order that they might be reclaimed. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1983), which adopts for postcolonial studies Gramsci’s term ‘subaltern’ – describing marginal groups denied a voice within a society’s dominant discourse – is increasingly cited by curators working in the field. Neither is Spivak shy of controversy, having recently turned her fire on ‘bourgeois’ Western feminists. Her influence in the artworld might partly be attributed to the impulse to decolonise and decentre, but also to her willingness to put theory to the service of action.
43 Sadie Coles
44 Joan Jonas
Gallerist British Last Year 34
Artist American Last Year 14
Sadie Coles HQ continues to provide the example to which a host of younger galleries aspire. Mixing established artists (Urs Fischer and Wilhelm Sasnal showed over the summer) with a younger generation widely touted by their peers (Uri Aran and Martine Syms made their debuts this year), the gallery is seen to marry commercial clout with critical relevance. It is this ability to forge connections that marks the London gallerist out: as the gap between top and bottom of the market widens, her reputation as a link between the two is supported by her commitment to the gallery exchange programme Condo, this year participating in its London, New York and Shanghai iterations. Coles is not alone on this list in seeking out new models that would better suit a multipolar artworld and mend the frayed ties between its smaller and larger enterprises. But she commands an unusually broad support.
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This year’s retrospective of Jonas’s work at Tate Modern offered belated recognition of the veteran artist’s influence and a reminder, in the premiere of a new performance, that she has no intention of letting up. Jonas’s heroic status among a younger generation of artists preoccupied by ecological disaster, body politics and interspecies communication has only recently been matched by an elevation to superstardom. Which has good and bad sides: in June, she was announced as the winner of the 2018 Kyoto Prize, worth roughly $900,000; in August, Munich’s Haus der Kunst announced that a budget shortfall meant that her Tate show would not travel to Germany. If it seems odd that an artist who for so long made and exhibited work on the margins should now outstrip the resources of a major institution, then a show at Amanda Wilkinson, London, confirmed that Jonas’s best work is still raw, rickety and intimate.
ArtReview
41 Photo: Andreas Endermann. Courtesy Kunstsammlung NRW 42 Courtesy Columbia University, New York 43 Photo: Jack Andrew Davidson 44 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York & Rome
41 Cao Fei
45 Philippe Parreno
46 Adrian Cheng
Artist French Last Year 60
Collector Hong Konger Last Year 46
45 Photo: Andrea Rossetti 46 Courtesy K11 Art Foundation 47 Photo: Richard Young 48 Photo: Albrecht Fuchs
Visitors to Parreno’s beautiful, unnerving show at Berlin’s Gropius Bau this year were confronted by conceptions of artistic authorship that are simply streets ahead, or leagues above. Much of the action (lights flicking off to illuminate glow-in-the-dark paintings, an electronic piano playing, the sound of Berlin radio stations) was directed not by Parreno but by fermenting, sugar-scoffing yeasts in a bioreactor, the artist’s collaborator for the last four years, whose organic learning he sees as a successor to algorithmic models. (Most of us are just now countenancing the latter.) Helium-filled fish balloons drifting around, moved by air currents shifted chancily by visitors (also popping up in Parreno’s Art Institute of Chicago show earlier in the year), more legibly displace control while converging the natural and synthetic – though of course the artist is making all the decisions upfront. Outside of Pierre Huyghe, hardly anyone else is operating in Parreno’s rarefied airspace. In a few years, many will be, and he’ll already be somewhere else.
The Yeezy-wearing entrepreneur, collector and patron this year invested in ObEN, a technology company that will bring AI to K11, the palace of shopping and art Cheng operates in Shanghai (alongside a smaller gallery space in Hong Kong and further commercial enterprises far and wide). Expect to be greeted by the avatar of a celebrity, curator or perhaps Cheng himself on future visits to the Art Mall. Cheng’s engagement with the future (one of his latest ventures, the nonprofit architecture and design project Culture for Tomorrow, kicked off last December with a Finnish sauna in HK), along with his wealth and his interest in emerging art, make him a catch for museum boards and committees, among them MoMA PS1, Royal Academy, Tate and the Centre Pompidou. Cheng has previously used these contacts to partner on shows at K11 (notably with the ICA London and New Museum, New York), but this Spring K11 produced its first independent show, Emerald City, curated by K11’s new artistic director, Venus Lau.
47 Stefan Kalmár
48 Daniel Buchholz
Curator German Reentry (94 in 2010)
Gallerist German Last Year 30
Kalmár made much of his desire, when taking over London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2016, to reassert the radical founding spirit of the institution. The programme over the past year has been widely acclaimed, with major exhibitions by Julie Becker, Metahaven, Forensic Architecture and Seth Price – incorporating a design studio, investigative journalism and, in Price’s case, a practice so diffuse as to resist categorisation – once again asking questions of what belongs, literally and metaphorically, in a contemporary art space. The commitment to experiment has also been reflected in an ambitious events programme – of which Chelsea Manning’s first UK appearance was surely the pièce de résistance – featuring roundtables, panel discussions, poetry readings, study groups and ‘discursive platforms’, as well as a wide-ranging and diverse cinema programme. The upshot is that, in a generally risk-averse climate, Kalmár has reestablished the ICA as London’s most imaginative and critically engaged public venue.
Buchholz continues to run not the biggest but probably the chicest gallery in Berlin, while also steering sites in New York and Cologne. His key artists sit at the intersection of credibility and commercial appeal: Wolfgang Tillmans, Tomma Abts, Danh Vo, Sergej Jensen, Isa Genzken, etc. Buchholz seems resistant to the expansionism du jour, preferring to branch out in other ways; this year, for example, saw a Berlin show for the archive of anthropologist Michael Oppitz and a New York presentation of Paul Bonet’s gorgeous, near-abstract geometric drawings for bookbindings, selected by gallery artist Florian Pumhösl. This was risky in a way that the latter’s own show in Berlin – featuring a vendible selection of slight variations on one sculptural form related to roofing – emphatically was not, a reminder that Buchholz must occasionally balance his more outré ideas with straightforward collector bait. Still, Galerie Buchholz remains an uncommonly class act.
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49 Adrian Piper
50 Kara Walker
Artist American NEW
Artist American Last Year 56
51 Manuel Borja-Villel & João Fernandes
52 Esther Schipper
Museum Directors Spanish/Portuguese NEW
Next year Schipper celebrates 30 years in business: she opened in 1989, in Cologne, with a General Idea show. The intervening decades saw, besides her championing of many key artists of the 90s, numerous changes – relocating to Berlin, merging with and then absorbing Johnen Galerie, opening her new Selldorf Architects-designed space last year – but some things don’t change. There was a General Idea/AA Bronson show at the gallery this year too, a big celebratory retrospective; and Schipper retains her keen understanding of which artists matter today (and to posterity). This year, between popping up at the major fairs and watching her artists such as Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal and Tomás Saraceno circulate through the artworld’s top echelons, she signed Hito Steyerl and Simon Fujiwara to the gallery, and her flexible programme found room for both the latter’s whiplashing, themepark-style simulator, Empathy I, and spectral works by Bangalore minimalist Prabhavathi Meppayil.
Gallerist German Last Year 61
The director of the Reina Sofía and his deputy Fernandes typically resist the lure of the blockbuster show – William Kentridge’s 2018 survey aside. Instead the Madrid institution has a more radical intent, suited to a time when, as Borja-Villel has noted, capitalism risks reducing audiences to ‘consuming and obedient automata’. Consequently, alongside the 21,000-strong collection (including, in keeping with the rhetoric, Picasso’s Guernica, 1937), the museum boasted an eclectic programme of names. Historical surveys this year included cartoonist George Herriman (best known for Krazy Kat, 1913–44), poet Fernando Pessoa, kinetic art pioneer Eusebio Sempere and the phenomenon of Russian Dada; on the contemporary side, the work of conceptualist Dora García, formalist Nairy Baghramian and activist Artur Barrio were also profiled in solo exhibitions.
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‘Racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology’, said the New York-based artist in a statement to accompany her show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co that went viral last year. This February her performative sculpture Katastwóf Karavan, a steam power calliope decorated with the artist’s trademark silhouettes and playing songs of ‘black protest and celebration’, belatedly appeared (following a dispute about costs) at Prospect.4 in New Orleans, while in April Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale (2011), which has lost none of its extraordinary power to shock and provoke, went on display at Sprüth Magers, Berlin. By the end of the year she had picked up SFMOMA’s Contemporary Vision Award for a body of work that has, since the 1990s, ‘challenged pre-conceived notions of race, sex and representation through contemporary visual art’. That she continues to do so, while inspiring others along the way, seems more important than ever now that the American Dream is falling apart.
ArtReview
49 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation, Berlin 50 Photo: Ari Marcopoulos 51 Photo: Joaquín Cortés/Román Lores. Courtesy Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid 52 Photo: Felix Brüggemann
Piper was this year the subject of the largest retrospective ever dedicated by New York’s MoMA to a living artist (it is now touring to the Hammer Museum in LA). At once belated and timely, the survey was recognition of a career spanning five decades in which Piper has harnessed a fierce intellect and sharp wit to the production of work with considerable political clout. The American-born, Berlin-based philosopher and conceptual artist, who hasn’t set foot in the US since learning in 2005 that she was on a US watch list for ‘suspicious travellers’, seeks to expose the infrastructures through which racism is exercised. As such she is an influence on a generation of artists increasingly inclined to mix media and modes of display in exploring the intersections of class and colour, art and the real world. Famously unwilling to suffer fools, notably ill-informed journalists, Piper offers an example of how an artist can use the discourse around her work to reinforce the very points about (mis)representation that it makes.
53 Anselm Franke
54 Emmanuel Perrotin
Curator German Last Year 74
Gallerist French Last Year 40
53 Photo: Jakob Hoff 54 © Karl Lagerfeld 55 Photo: Gilbert Hage/ Rain Tree 56 Photo: Stella Olivier
Over his five years as head of the department of visual arts and film at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Franke has made the research-driven expanded-exhibition format that questions perceived truths and accepted norms his own. Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War explored the relationship between ideology and artistic freedom through an investigation into the CIA’s funding of arts organisations during the Cold War era. Neolithic Childhood took the work of ‘extraacademic’ art historian Carl Einstein as a vehicle to explore (via no less than 180 artworks and 600 archival sources) the development of ideas about ‘world art’ and how Europe’s interwar avant-gardes reached out to different branches of culture and science as a means of interrogating their present. For Franke, of course, history is a means of interrogating our present in turn. And his methods are increasingly prevalent in the work of other curators (as the early chapters of Hamburger Bahnhof’s Hello World exhibition demonstrated) and fellow travellers (among them Forensic Architecture).
Perrotin’s new gallery in Shanghai, which opened in May with Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, is the latest addition to an empire already encompassing Paris, New York, Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong. The rapid recent expansion (the openings in Korea and Japan, as well as the move into a vast new space in New York’s Lower East Side, all took place in the past three years) offers up further evidence that the taste for the spectacular that led the French gallerist to sign Takashi Murakami, Kaws and Maurizio Cattelan has translated well, or at least profitably, into the Instagram age. The past year saw exhibitions by Murakami in New York, Xu Zhen in Seoul, Daniel Arsham in Tokyo and Kaws in Hong Kong; for Sophie Calle’s show in Paris, meanwhile, Laurie Anderson, Bono and Pharrell Williams contributed songs to a memorial album to the artist’s dead cat, Souris.
55 Christine Tohmé
56 William Kentridge
Curator Lebanese Last Year 50
Artist South African Last Year 58
‘You can’t talk about Lebanon in isolation,’ Tohmé told Artforum in 2015, ‘you have to understand it as part of a region where things are unstable, where the whole map is being redrafted.’ Closing earlier this year, Tohmé’s border-crossing Sharjah Biennial 13 – a yearlong programme of exhibitions, public programmes and projects stretching across Sharjah, Beirut, Dakar, Ramallah and Istanbul – was the most ambitious expression yet of the curator’s desire to make connections across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. But it’s been there all along: Ashkal Alwan, the nonprofit arts organisation she founded in Beirut in 1994 after the conclusion of the Lebanese Civil War, continues to play a crucial role in helping local artists onto the international stage and advancing the city’s reputation as a creative hub. It was in recognition of those services that Tohmé was awarded the UNESCO Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in May.
In the course of a 40-year career Kentridge has projected a practice based on the intimacy of prints, drawings and animations onto the grandest of scales. If the past year wasn’t quite so busy as the one preceding it – when his work seemed to take over museums, galleries, theatre festivals and even public spaces across the world – it still furthered his claim to be among the world’s most respected living artists. A major survey at the Reina Sofía in Madrid traced the branching out of the South African artist’s politically engaged practice into theatre, installation, modernist opera, puppetry, film and performance, while there were further exhibitions at museums in Frankfurt, Boston, Ohio and Wisconsin, as well as at Goodman Gallery in the artist’s native Johannesburg. But the highlight was surely the staging of a widely acclaimed live commission, The Head & The Load, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, commemorating the contribution of African soldiers to the First World War.
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57 Lorenz Helbling
58 Adam Szymczyk
Gallerist Swiss Last Year 51
Curator Polish Last Year 4 That Szymczyk’s staging of Documenta 14 across Athens and Kassel divided opinion might have been expected, given the curator’s promise to challenge preconceptions about what the major exhibition could be. Yet controversy shifted into crisis when it emerged late last year that the organisation had overspent by €7m, leading the Kassel branch of Germany’s far-right AfD party to sue Szymczyk and CEO Annette Kulenkampff for mismanaging public funds (they were cleared in August of any wrongdoing). That the exhibition had been politicised was confirmed in October by the removal of Olu Oguibe’s Monument to Strangers and Refugees (2017) from Kassel’s central square by the local government. Szymczyk might have been guilty of overreach, but his radical decentring of the quinquennial – twinned exhibitions complemented by expansive publishing and public programmes exploring indigeneity, antifascism, resistance, identity and marginality – provoked conversations that feel increasingly pressing. Not to mention that his recent travails reveal the upped stakes in the European culture wars. His next move is attended with interest.
59 Eli & Edythe Broad
60 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang
Collectors American Last Year 32
Gallerists Chinese Last Year 42
Last year Eli Broad announced he was retiring, passing on the running of his and wife Edythe’s philanthropic foundation, with its $2.5b endowment, to chairman Gerun Riley. Yet the Broad name remains attached to pretty much every arts organisation in Los Angeles and the locale, not least MOCA, LACMA, the museum at Michigan State University, the theatre at Santa Monica College and the Los Angeles Opera. And of course all this ongoing support sits alongside The Broad, the couple’s own museum that opened in 2015 to hold their 2,000-strong collection (the big crowdpleaser this year was to bring Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms into the building). The temporary shows also provide side benefits (of a financial kind) beyond the West Coast: this year the museum brought in the Royal Academy’s survey of Californian Jasper Johns and in 2019 it will take Soul of a Nation, Tate Modern’s 2017 survey of African-American art.
To describe Vitamin Creative Space as a gallery doesn’t do the operation run by Zhang and Hu justice. Since its founding in 2002, Vitamin has operated in hybrid mode, as a gallery and as an independent art space, with the notion that the one should feed the other and the whole should be like some mythical ouroboros. The myth becomes reality at the organisation’s HQ , the Sou Fujimoto-designed villagelike Mirrored Gardens just outside Guangzhou, where social space, research institution, bookshop and conventional gallery all merge into one. Art fair appearances are kept to a manageable minimum (Art Basel in Hong Kong and in Basel, FIAC), leaving artists – among them some of Asia’s leading lights, such as Cao Fei, Ming Wong, Lee Kit, Koki Tanaka, and stars from the West, such as Dahn Vo, Olafur Eliasson and Anton Vidokle – to develop research-based projects that blend tradition and innovation with cultural discourse from almost all parts of the globe.
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58 Photo: Melanie Hofmann 60 Photo: Hu Fang
As Western galleries rush to expand into new markets in China, the Swiss founder of Shanghart can confidently say ‘done that’. Shanghart has been in business since 1996 and now operates galleries in Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore. Exhibitions over the past 12 months read like a who’s who of Chinese art, with the likes of Ding Yi, Sun Xun, Xu Zhen and David Diao all having solo shows. Not to mention gallery artist Zeng Fanzhi, who was showing across three branches of the Hauser & Wirth empire this autumn. This summer, in collaboration with Brussels gallery Waldburger Wouters (one half of which is a fellow Swiss expat), the gallery opened Büro, a project space in Basel, with a show by American conceptualist Lynn Hershman Leeson. That’s right, having conquered the East, Helbling seems also to be setting his sights on the West, as a Shanghai solo exhibition for British artist Michael Dean in the prime pre-Art Basel Hong Kong slot demonstrated.
61 Photo: Stefano Sciuto 62 Photo: Peter Rigaud 63 Photo: Noor Photoface. Courtesy Samdani Art Foundation 64 Photo: Michael Danner. Courtesy the artist
61 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
62 Thaddaeus Ropac
Collector Italian Last Year 69
Since opening his first space 37 years ago in a Tyrolean town at the age of twenty-three, Ropac has built a five-gallery mini-empire triangulated across Salzburg, Paris and London. The top artists of his 60-strong roster are the bluest of blue-chip (witness recent showings for Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer, Adrian Ghenie, Elizabeth Peyton and Antony Gormley), though Ropac is careful to balance that with relatively woke, externally curated programming, particularly in his London space – this year, a three-artist show of women minimalists and postminimalists, and a solo for Venezuelan painter Alvaro Barrington – and ‘museum-quality’ miniretrospectives like one for Joseph Beuys. That said, an air of the money-minting machine, more than auteur-ish innovation, hangs around Ropac. When he noted, earlier this year, that he’d hosted Theresa May at his Salzburg gallery and looked forward to fewer restrictions on art trading in London after Brexit, it didn’t seem wholly out of character.
Gallerist Austrian Last Year 65
She celebrated 25 years of her collection in 2017, and Sandretto Re Rebaudengo hasn’t paused to take a breath. While work continues on a David Adjaye-designed space for her foundation in Madrid (scheduled for next year), works from her 1,000-plus collection made the journey to a big show at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai in March. In exchange, a show of work from Asia went to the foundation’s homebase in Turin, where this year’s programme also marked a fresh focus on female artists, with solo presentations by Rachel Rose, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Monster Chetwynd. These kinds of long-range exchanges, her presence on the councils of various big international museums (Tate and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to name but two) and her commitment to supporting artists through commissioning and producing are evidence of Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s enthusiasm for the private sector supporting art beyond the market. In July work from the collection even found its way to Rochdale (Greater Manchester).
63 Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani
64 Kader Attia
Collectors Bangladeshi Last Year 93
Artist French-Algerian Last Year 75
While the couple’s private museum is still being built in the rural Bangladeshi district of Sylhet (when finished it will house their prodigious collection of South Asian art – augmented with some Western work – and boast a sculpture garden and residency programme), they continue to produce the increasingly important Dhaka Art Summit, organised by curator Diana Campbell Betancourt. Now in its fourth edition, the biennial meeting this year expanded from four to nine days and featured over 300 artists (35 percent international) and 120 speakers. While the artworld is increasingly happy to go to Dhaka, the Samdanis themselves are in global demand: members of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee and Tate’s International Council, they donated a work from their collection to the Met, loaned to the Liverpool Biennial and sponsored work in the Gwangju Biennale, while their 2018 exhibition, A beast, a god, and a line travelled to Para Site in Hong Kong and TS1 in Yangon, Myanmar.
Attia is an unlikely art star: his video installations are often long, thoughtful affairs, politics never far from the surface. He does make big, biennial-friendly installations, but they are never spectacular for the sake of it. At the Gwangju Biennial this year the artist exhibited a series of mismatched pairs of prosthetic legs sat on chairs; in between these eerie spotlit assemblages, a series of low-mounted monitors screen interviews with people from across Asia who have been caught up in wars and uprisings, as well as mental health professionals ruminating on the legacy of trauma. Attia also showed at Manifesta 12 in Sicily, and undertook four solo museum exhibitions, while maintaining the programme of workshops, music festivals and exhibitions at La Colonie, the off-space he runs in Paris. Nor is his pace slackening. His work is to appear in the imminent Shanghai Biennale, while next year the Hayward Gallery in London will stage a survey.
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66 Sunjung Kim
Curator Swiss NEW
Curator South Korean Last Year 72
‘When I curate a biennial in Dakar, I want a global discussion,’ Njami told Artsy in May, at the opening of this year’s Dak’Art – his second time heading up Senegal’s long-running biennial. From cofounding the magazine Revue Noire (1991–2001, at a time when, he recalls, many European gallerists ‘insisted that contemporary art did not exist in Africa’), to his groundbreaking Africa Remix show in the mid-2000s, Njami has been a key figure in the battle to recentre (and decentre) the narrative of contemporary art in and from Africa. For Njami, constantly travelling between the continent’s growing art scenes, supporting the institutional cultures and networks necessary for getting art shown and circulated, are as important as the art itself; for Dak’Art he invited curators from Hong Kong to Mexico to curate international sections, while his Kampala Art Biennale in August brought established artists to set up studio in the Ugandan capital, to mentor groups of ‘apprentice’ artists.
67 Donna Haraway
68 Hyun-Sook Lee
Philosopher American Last Year 61
Gallerist Korean Last Year 79
That Haraway’s name was less routinely dropped in press releases and curatorial statements this year than last might be taken as evidence that her ideas have percolated through to the theoretical bedrock of contemporary art. Essays including ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1984) and ‘Situated Knowledges’ (1986) are by now firmly established as canonical texts of which any artist, curator or writer working around issues of artificial intelligence, ecofeminism and posthumanism is expected to have at least a working knowledge. Those practitioners will continue to build on Haraway’s findings, however much the theorist’s more recent writing on global population pressure (as a solution to which she proposes childlessness) has divided opinion. Indeed, as the pace of the ecological and technological change addressed by Haraway’s prescient early work accelerates, so her place in the discourse around the intersections of art, technology and society becomes more assured.
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Having until recently directed the private Artsonje Center, where she initiated the Real DMZ Project (in Korea’s demilitarised zone), having curated both the Seoul Mediacity and Gwangju biennials in her native South Korea, and having been director of research at the fledgling Asia Culture Centre (ACC), also in Gwangju, Kim can be said to have played a major role in the development of South Korea’s contemporary art scene. A year after her appointment as president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, the first iteration of Kim’s vision for one of Asia’s most highprofile art events featured 11 curators and opened to a mixed response. Nevertheless, it marked a sea-change in working methods: gone were the big-name international curators, and the biennial was truly spread across the city. Between all that, Kim found time to curate an exhibition about the Real DMZ Project at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham and Francis Alÿs’s first South Korean outing at Artsonje.
‘I think today the binary between “Korean” and “non-Korean” [art] no longer exists,’ Lee told Ocula last summer. Kukje Gallery, which she founded back in 1982, has been instrumental in the reemergence of the Dansaekhwa group of Korean monochromists – among them Lee Ufan, Park Seo Bo and Yun Hyong-keun – who now pepper the programmes of many of her international colleagues, but it’s a younger generation of Korean artists, such as Park Chan-kyong and the increasingly ubiquitous Haegue Yang, who have represented the gallery’s ambitions in recent times. That’s not to say that the gallery is only about pushing Korean artists to global recognition: with Roni Horn, Paul McCarthy, Byron Kim and Michael Joo all having solo shows in Seoul over the past 12 months, Kukje lives up to its international promise. It’s no surprise then that it continues to grow: this August it opened F1963, an outpost (in addition to its three gallery spaces in Seoul) in a former wire factory in Busan.
ArtReview
65 Photo: Aïda Muluneh 66 Courtesy the Gwangju Biennale Foundation 67 Photo: Rusten Hogness 68 Courtesy Kukje Gallery
65 Simon Njami
69 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong
70 Klaus Biesenbach
Museum Director / Curator Australian / Korean Last Year 59
Museum Director German Last Year 57
69 Courtesy of WKCDA 70 Photo: Casey Kelbaugh 71 Courtesy the artist 72 Photo: Antoine Tempé
M+’s Summer Camp – a youth-targeted initiative – was titled ‘Far Out’. That’s exactly what the continuously postponed completion date for Hong Kong’s megamuseum (where Raffel is director and Chong chief curator) has started to feel like. In August the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (which runs the larger development of which M+ is a part) fired its main contractor, Hsin Chong Construction, following its insolvency (a year after trading in the company’s shares was suspended), which will lead to further delays to the museum’s opening: the current date of 2020 (the museum was originally due to open in 2017) is a possibility, not a promise. To make up for that, M+ acquired the Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Archive, containing 500 works (largely online) by the Korean duo and any future works the pair post to their website, adding to its already impressive holdings of modern and contemporary Asian art.
In August it was announced that Biesenbach would be leaving his position as director of MoMA PS1 and chief curator of MoMA to lead MOCA Los Angeles. He will be its third director in eight years when he takes up the position in 2019. Biesenbach is not the stereotypical ‘safe pair of hands’, but while some of his exhibitions in New York have failed to garner critical acclaim, this is countered by lauded shows such as this year’s Cathy Wilkes solo at PS1, and his habit of championing artists the rest of us are yet to cotton on to. And there is no doubt he has the skills to steady the ship. Biesenbach knows that where he goes, attention is paid. The only blip this year came with a lawsuit issued by curator Nikki Columbus alleging that MoMA PS1 had offered her a curatorial position, only to rescind the offer when it found out that she was pregnant.
71 Liam Gillick
72 Koyo Kouoh
Artist British Last Year 52
Curator Cameroonian Last Year 92
One of the few artists to have emerged in 1990s Britain and kept their dignity intact, Gillick has long been in pivot mode as a cultural producer: exhibiting, writing, curating, maintaining his nonpareil network, and pushing himself when he hardly needs to. This year he presented a substantial solo show in Vilnius, his first in the Baltic region, in which, via colourfully glowing geometric architectural models amid a desert of sawdust, he adroitly revivified the warehouse sites of international nightclubs, characteristically correlating modernist aesthetics and neoliberalism. But it was in other activities that Gillick showed his restlessness, making a through-the-veil collaboration with Swiss modernist architect/designers Trix and Robert Haussmann (Gillick-style hyphenates avant la lettre) in a show at Kunst-Werke in Berlin and, with Tom Eccles and ArtReview’s Mark Rappolt, cocurating the buzzworthy, centuriesspanning show Like a Moth to a Flame across two venues in Turin.
Kouoh’s RAW Material Company in Dakar boasts an exhibition space, a residency programme and an academy for locally based artists to study ‘artistic and curatorial practice and thought’. Given that the academy faculty includes anthropologist and filmmaker Elizabeth A. Povinelli, as well as artists Rick Lowe and Rosa Barba, and that its current session is led by artist Otobong Nkanga (herself a former RAW resident), one would imagine that Dakar is seeing a surge in artist residents as a result. At RAW Kouoh cocurated the group exhibition All of the wrongs that were in the world, I gathered them up, an instalment of the Goethe-Institut/HKW-initiated Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology project. In Berlin, she cocurated HKW’s three-day project Saving Bruce Lee – African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy. By the end of the year Kouoh was heading off to Pittsburgh, where her exhibition Dig Where You Stand was on view as part of this year’s Carnegie International.
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73 Haegue Yang
74 Marina Abramović
Artist South Korean Last Year 85
Artist Serbian Last Year 89
75 Tom Eccles
76 Claire Hsu
School Director British-American Last Year 82
Curator Austrian-Chinese Last Year 70
As director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, Eccles continues to hothouse the key curators of tomorrow – and to co-organise shows for the Hessel Museum he founded there – from his perch in the Hudson Valley. But that’s just one aspect of the loquacious, peripatetic and impossibly networked Scotsman’s life, which has taken in running the New York Public Art Fund; indefatigable interviewing for (cough) ArtReview; the occasional curatorial project with its editor (double cough); continuing to advise Maja Hoffmann’s LUMA Foundation; and curating at the Park Avenue Armory, where this summer he organised a show by the multidisciplinary artist Nick Cave, a processional mix of installation and performance. Such boundary-pushing projects are right in the wheelhouse of a figure awarded an honorary doctorate this year by the University of Gothenburg, which surveyed his myriad doings and found the apropos descriptor: ‘a catalyst for change’.
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Are you a curator who wants to do a show with Marina Abramović? Fancy the visitor figures a celebrity artist can bring? (Her 2010 MoMA show was the most popular in the institution’s history, with 850,000 visitors, a number not quite matched by this year’s solos at Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; Sean Kelly, New York; and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, but boons for those spaces nonetheless.) Well get in the queue, because the performance artist’s exhibition schedule is booked to 2024. Abramović is famous enough to be lampooned by Cate Blanchett in a forthcoming Netflix comedy (‘Waiting for the Artist’, an episode of the Documentary Now! series screening next year) and attacked by an artist (a man smashed a portrait of Abramović over the artist’s head in September). Nor does the artist need to be present to make herself felt: the Marina Abramović Institute is increasingly active, staging, for example, eight performances by artists using her ‘method’ at this year’s Bangkok Art Biennale.
Asia Art Archive, the Hong Kong-based nonprofit of which Hsu is cofounder and director, has steadily consolidated its standing among the region’s most influential institutions. Structured around an expanding library, it incorporates residencies, workshops, conferences and symposia that not only document but, increasingly, shape the historical discourse around contemporary Asian art. It continues to fill the cultural vacuum set aside years ago for Hong Kong’s long-awaited M+ museum, while being prepared to take risks and ruffle feathers, as illustrated by the dedication of its booth at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong to the Guerrilla Girls’ research into the local artworld. That the invitation didn’t exempt the organisation from criticism, with the activists highlighting the lack of diversity in its archives, only shows that this is an institution that is aware of the responsibilities that come with shaping cultural history.
ArtReview
73 Photo: Studio Haegue Yang. Courtesy Kukje Gallery 74 Photo: Carlo Bach 75 Photo: Walead Beshty 76 Photo: Dave Choi
Yang has become ubiquitous of late: her largescale installation work recognisable in biennials and group shows for its recurring use of Venetian blinds and faux-folkloric straw woven work. Oblique in meaning and monstrous in form, these nonetheless beguiling spectacles could this year be found everywhere from the Liverpool and Sydney biennials to (counterintuitively) the National Gallery Singapore’s survey of Minimalism. European audiences had the easiest access to her work this year (the Berlin-based artist is a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt): having won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2017, an attached career survey was staged at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in the spring, concurrent to a solo show at Kunsthaus Graz; in the autumn she took on La Panacée – MoCo in Montpellier and La Triennale di Milano. It is a relentless career that, after she was illegally blacklisted by the previous government, is now being appreciated in her native South Korea: this October she received the Republic of Korea Culture and Arts Award.
78 Delfina Entrecanales & Aaron Cezar
77 Yuko Hasegawa Curator Japanese Last Year 90
79 Photo: Bob Wolfenson 80 Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) may have been closed for renovations this year, but its artistic director’s activities most certainly were not. At the end of last year she opened Japanorama at the Pompidou Metz, exploring the country’s artistic production from the postwar era to the present and centred around her favoured theme: the posthuman body. That was followed by a retrospective exhibition of iconic 1980s avantgardists Dumb Type at the same institution. And Hasegawa continued to make France a mini-Japan in July, with Fukami, a show exploring Japanese aesthetics via traditional and contemporary works of art at Paris’s Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild. ‘You could call my perspective post avantgarde to the extent that I highlight artists who developed their practices at a distance from Western influence,’ Hasegawa told Numéro magazine at the time. That’s not to say that she’s avoiding Western influences, however, as a solo exhibition of work by Francis Alÿs, curated at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum in November, will surely prove.
Foundation Founder/Curator British/American Reentry (100 in 2015 / NEW) Over 300 artists have passed through the Delfina Foundation’s residency programme in the past decade, and with its focus having expanded beyond the MENA region to include the Global South, alumni can be found everywhere (the most recent Venice Biennale featured 12 former residents). Under Cezar’s directorship the foundation partnered with Saudi private foundation Art Jameel this year (Cezar will become a senior adviser, and they collaborated on an Ala Younis show), the Dhaka Art Summit (the winner of the Samdani Art Award, chaired by Cezar, will get a residency), Frieze Art Fair (the winner of the Frieze Artist Award, juried by Cezar, will get to stay at the London HQ ) and SongEun ArtSpace, Seoul (where Cezar curated a show of former Delfina residents), so these tentacles stretch further still. But it all comes back to the gallery (and the kitchen in which residents cook for each other), which continues a steady programme of shows, talks and performances.
79 Luisa Strina
80 Bose Krishnamachari & Anita Dube
Gallerist Brazilian Last Year 49 Things are ticking over steadily at Strina’s gallery with shows for Federico Herrero, Marcellvs L. and Nicolás Paris this year. As has become tradition, the Paulistana gallerist tapped a name curator for the annual group exhibition: Magalí Arriola, former chief curator of Fundación Jumex and Museo Tamayo, brought together works by David Medalla, Cildo Meireles, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Huyghe and Laura Lima, among others, to consider ‘daydreams and uncanny nightmares’. That Strina can pull on art historical bigwigs for a group show is testament to the power underpinning the operation: you don’t spend 44 years in business – building the careers of Meireles, Anna Maria Maiolino and Lygia Pape among others – without amassing art of your own that can, in turn, be loaned. Yet Strina is not resting on her laurels: the art fair she opened with Thiago Gomide last year, Semana de Arte, took on a new venue this year – the Oscar Niemeyerdesigned pavilion in Parque Ibirapuera – and an expanded exhibitor list.
Artists Indian/Indian Last Year 84/NEW The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, cofounded by Krishnamachari and fellow artist Riyas Komu, has become a blueprint for art events rooted in the realities of locality yet international in ambition and scope. #MeToo allegations against Komu, however, have taken something of the shine off. Komu swiftly stepped aside pending an investigation, and Dube, the biennial’s first woman curator (of this December’s fourth iteration), issued a statement saying, ‘I take the issue of women’s empowerment… seriously. It informs my curatorial deliberations and I try to practice what I preach’, adding that the biennial itself was undergoing a ‘process of structural change’. That Kerala has experienced its worst flooding in decades may also have extended the biennial’s focus beyond Dube’s stated ambition to examine resistance to the influence of capital and spectacle on contemporary culture.
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Museum Director German New As founding director of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where she is also a professor, Bauer has since 2013 established a programme integrating exhibitions, residencies and research. Recent group exhibition Trees of Life – Knowledge in Material was a case in point, conceived as part of a long-term, in-house research project accompanied by a series of talks and discussions. As founder of NTU’s MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, the first of its kind in Southeast Asia, Bauer is also shaping how the region’s art will be framed in the future. Indeed, as the West adjusts to the idea that the story of modern and contemporary art might have more than one narrative strand, Bauer is well placed to suggest how they might be woven together. That this isn’t as straightforward as some of her Western peers seem to think is suggested by the title of the section she curated at this year’s Kuandu Biennale in Taipei: ‘The Impossibility of Mapping (Asia)’.
In the idyllic Swiss municipality of Rossa one might find a candy-striped house. It’s a new permanent work by Daniel Buren. Step into the Chiesa di Santa Venera in Palermo this year and you’ll have likely found an alternative crucifixion made of a blanket, wallpaper, wax and epoxy. That was a collateral project by Berlinde De Bruyckere to coincide with Manifesta. Walk a block from Havana’s town hall, and you’ll find Galleria Continua, the gallery that sponsored these projects, and for whom working away from the central art hubs is second nature: Cristiani, Fiaschi and Rigillo’s other spaces are on the rural fringe of Paris, the Italian town of San Gimignano and – bucking their own trend – Beijing. Through this network they further the careers of, among others, Anish Kapoor (who collaborated with Buren on a show in Italy), Michelangelo Pistoletto (who showed new mirror paintings in China) and the estate of Chen Zhen (whose installation work the trio took to Cuba).
83 Richard Chang
84 Cecilia Alemani
Collector American Last Year 71
Curator Italian Last Year 78
Founder of the Beijing-based DOMUS Collection (which includes largescale works by artists such as Laura Owens, Paul McCarthy, Olafur Eliasson, Arthur Jafa, Cao Fei, Ran Huang, Damien Hirst and Alex Israel), the New York-based collector and investment professional continues to loan works to major exhibitions (Tatsuo Miyajima’s epic Mega Death (1996/2016) is currently on show as part of the National Gallery Singapore’s blockbuster Minimalism exhibition), fund new productions (such as Julien Nguyen’s video Spiritus Mundi, 2018, recently on show at the Swiss Institute, New York), lend support to art events (like this year’s Ghost:2561 in Thailand, curated by Korakrit Arunanondchai) and more generally encourage crosscultural exchange in the contemporary artworld. Chang is no slouch on the institutional front either: vice chair of the International Council at the Tate, president of the board of Performa in New York and a trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts in London keeps him busy.
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Gallerists Italian Last Year 76
Since becoming inaugural director of New York’s High Line Art programme, in 2011, Alemani has developed a model for contemporary art in public spaces – with recent commissions including work by Phyllida Barlow and Dorothy Iannone – that has been widely imitated. She was also curator of the artist projects strand at Frieze New York from 2012 to 2017, and in 2017 she also organised the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her latest foray into new exhibition formats came as artistic director of Art Basel’s first Cities project, for which she oversaw a weeklong, citywide public art programme in Buenos Aires featuring work by 18 artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Stan VanDerBeek and Barbara Kruger in September. Having worked with museums, fairs and foundations across the world on exhibitions, projects and public programmes, and with a reputation for innovation and flexibility, Alemani is well adapted to the changing landscape of contemporary art.
ArtReview
81 Photo: Christine Fenzl 82 Photo: Ela Bialkowska - Oknostudio 84 Photo: Liz Ligon. Courtesy Friends of the High Line, New York
82 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi, Maurizio Rigillo
81 Ute Meta Bauer
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86 Almine Rech
Curator British Reentry (43 in 2010)
Gallerist French Last Year 88
Higgs could (possibly) be described as the insider’s outsider. The UK-born artist, critic and curator took over at New York’s White Columns in 2004, bringing to it (and New York) his intuitive grasp of how art can mix pop culture, subculture and every culture that doesn’t count as lifelessly institutional. So while he’s plugged in and sought after (he’s founding curatorial adviser to New York’s Independent art fair, and could place a curated section based on the life of legendary dealer Hudson at Frieze New York in May), his appreciation of the maverick reaches far from artworld epicentres – with painter Peter Doig, Higgs organised a show of the overlooked Grenada-born British painter Denzil Forrester, in the artist’s home of Cornwall. White Columns, meanwhile, ranges widely (having moved to bigger premises in April) – from a show about punk icon Richard Hell to shows by artists who live with mental illness and disability.
87 Arthur Jafa
88 Pablo León de la Barra
Artist American Last Year 81
Curator Mexican Last Year 98
It’s rare that a single artwork encapsulates the times, but Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) undoubtedly does. Shown repeatedly and to acclaim – and bought by the Met, MOCA LA and other institutions – since it debuted at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise before the 2016 US election, the seven-minute film is a collaged summa of the black American experience, like a journey inside someone’s dreams and nightmares: police brutality, sports and music stardom, evocations of community, civil rights footage and more, tied together by the music of Kanye West, Earl Sweatshirt and others. It seems all the more extraordinary that Jafa, in his late fifties, presented it after a decade out of the spotlight. Now the artworld has clasped him to its bosom, and Jafa returned to Gavin Brown this year with an ambitious show mixing video, photography and sculpture, reaffirming him as a vital voice in turbulent times.
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Rech is assiduously doing what gallerists just below the mega-gallery echelon do. She’s nurturing her key artists: Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, James Turrell, Francesco Vezzoli, etc. She’s getting in outside curators to present museological shows of, this year, Arte Povera photographs, Cuban modernist sculptor Agustín Cárdenas and a Norman Rosenthalcurated comparison of Neo-Expressionism and contemporary painting. And she’s finding young artists. The wheels are turning, sure, yet that Rech is currently holding a ceramics-themed show in New York – some time after seemingly everyone else picked up on the resurgent medium – feels apropos: her gallery often ticks boxes drawn by others. One positive sign, though, is Rech’s pronounced tilt towards painting. While many big galleries have become structureless boutiques, her support for a single format – and young firecrackers like Genieve Figgis – is something others might learn from.
It’s not León de la Barra’s two jobs that get him here – though curator at large, Latin America, at the Guggenheim Museum, and curator at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, the spaceshiplike institution across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, is not a bad start. It is more that he has become a gatekeeper to success for young Latin American artists, and the person to tap up if you need local expertise. Art Basel brought him onboard for its inaugural Cities programme in Buenos Aires, he was a nominator for the Frieze Artist Award, juror for the Nasher and Faena prizes, and section curator at Expo Chicago, and he sat on the selection committee for Peru’s 2019 Venice pavilion. This artworld stuff doesn’t get in the way of more esoteric ventures, though, such as a show he curated on Solentiname, the Nicaraguan artist colony set up by a poet and priest, at 80WSE, New York.
ArtReview
85 Photo: Aubrey Mayer 86 Photo: Bec Lorrimer. Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery 87 Photo: Nathanael Turner 88 Courtesy 80WSE / New York University
85 Matthew Higgs
90 Photo: Ilgin Erarslan Yanmaz 91 Photo: Pasquale Abbattista
89 Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
90 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Gallerists American Last Year 38
Museum Director American Last Year 67
The gallerists swelled their 43-strong roster with an additional four artists and an estate this year. This last was Robert Colescott, whose paintings, which Blum & Poe hung at their Los Angeles gallery in March, combined surrealism with satire to comment on the state of race politics. Also joining the gallery was young West Coaster Mimi Lauter, who had a show in May, Chicago-based Tony Lewis, Brazilian Solange Pessoa and Japan’s Tomoo Gokita. The gallery has had a presence in Gokita’s hometown of Tokyo since 2014, and it was there, in June, that it showed Agnès Varda. The New Wave filmmaker is undergoing something of a renaissance (and, in collaborations with JR, being embraced by the artworld). That the boys are championing an older artist proves something of a theme: they also gave octogenarian sculptor Wendell Dayton his first major solo show.
When Christov-Bakargiev was announced as the director of both the Castello di Rivoli and GAM in 2016, raised eyebrows indicated doubts that even this highly accomplished curator (Documenta 2012, Istanbul Biennial 2015) could take on the two Turin institutions at once. This year, however, she relinquished the reins of GAM to concentrate her energy on the one museum. There she commissioned a new work by Hito Steyerl – the artist’s first in two years – as part of a solo show by the German artist, as well as exhibitions by Gilberto Zorio and Cécile B. Evans. Yet the most pressing task is the incorporation of the $570m collection of Francesco Federico Cerruti that the museum was bequeathed on long-term loan – along with the reclusive collector’s villa – upon his death in 2015. Christov-Bakargiev’s restless energy paid off: in October CCS Bard gave her its $25,000 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.
91 Massimo De Carlo
92 Wang Wei & Liu Yiqian
Gallerist Italian Last Year 66
Collectors Chinese Last Year 80
While his new space in Milan, Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, an icon of 1930s Milanese architecture designed by Piero Portaluppi, is still under renovation (‘The white cube gallery format is over’, the dealer declared this year), De Carlo filled his two present galleries in the Lombardy city with a programme that veered towards artists of vintage: exhibitions of minimalist Carl Andre, Fluxus artist John Armleder and Pop artist Bertrand Lavier were among those who showed. De Carlo’s London gallery programme had a more youthful bent, with exhibitions by relative spring chickens Rob Pruitt and Josh Smith, and he took Doug Aitken to show in the Hong Kong gallery. The American artist’s debut in Greater China (De Carlo is expanding his reach in Asia, taking booths at both Art Taipei and the Korea International Art Fair for the first time this year) included Mirage (2017), a house covered in mirrors, bought off-plan to be constructed wherever the collector chooses.
The billionaire investor couple’s Long Museum West Bund remains Shanghai’s premier private museum for contemporary art. And given that there is no abundance of state-run institutions dedicated to that field, this is more important than it might be elsewhere. Liu, a serial record-breaker when it comes to buying (having previously paid $170m for a Modigliani painting and $36m for a porcelain ‘chicken cup’), may have kept things relatively reasonable this year, but the Long Museum West Bund (one of two Long Museums in Shanghai – the Pudong venue focuses on ‘red classics’ from the Chinese revolutionary period – with a third in Chongqing and a fourth due to open imminently in Wuhan) continues to focus on presenting work by some of the most high-profile (and high-value) Chinese and international artists: the past 12 months have included a retrospective of work by Louise Bourgeois, a new production by Yang Fudong and a 40-year survey of Chinese contemporary art.
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93 Tim Neuger and Burkhard Riemschneider
94 John Akomfrah
Gallerists German Last Year 73
As a founder of Black Audio Film Collective, formed after the 1981 Brixton Riots, and a hugely influential filmmaker in his own right, Akomfrah has been charting the intersection of contemporary art, social history and identity politics for close to four decades. Given recent developments in all three fields, then, it’s no surprise that he’s in demand: in June, New York’s New Museum opened Akomfrah’s first US survey, while Purple, his 2017 Barbican commission, toured various European museums, and Vertigo Sea, the multiscreen work first shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale, continued its own apparently neverending global sojourn via SFMOMA, where it was exhibited alongside J.M.W. Turner’s The Deluge (1805). That Akomfrah is engaged in developing something like a twenty-first-century equivalent to history painting is supported by a multimedia installation at the Imperial War Museum, London. Opening in September, it tells the story of the millions of Africans who served in the First World War.
Artist British NEW
95 Eugene Tan
96 Vanessa Carlos
Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 95
Gallerist Brazilian Last Year 100
Over recent years we’ve become used to seeing Western institutions shipping exhibitions out to venues in Asia. Tan and the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) are bucking that trend, this year sending an exhibition of work by foundational Malaysian modernist Latiff Mohidin to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. There’s a feeling too that as Western institutions seek to complicate and expand their narratives of Modernism, their story of modern and contemporary art might well be coming from the ones being researched and told at institutions like NGS and others in Southeast Asia. While Tan was on the Bangkok Art Biennale’s selection committee, back on home soil NGS continued its triple focus on the local (exhibitions or projects by Ho Tzu Nyen, Lim Cheng Hoe), the regional (Pinaree Sanpitak, Rirkrit Tiravanija) and the international (Yayoi Kusama, Lee Mingwei), sometimes bringing them all together in blockbuster shows such as the upcoming Minimalism: Space Light Object.
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Carlos says she created Condo, the international gallery-exchange programme that this year spread beyond its now annual London and New York outings (launched in 2016 and 2017 respectively) to Mexico City and Shanghai, with pared-down versions taking place in Athens and São Paulo, out of ‘frustration with how the artworld we were inheriting from a previous generation largely mimicked the neoliberal pyramid structure’. It has inspired (presumably) welcome imitators (including Vacation in New York and Okey Dokey in Germany’s Rhineland) and made Carlos a regular on the conference circuit. Back in London, besides the day job of running Carlos/Ishikawa (and the careers of artists including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Oscar Murillo and Evelyn Taocheng Wang), she emerged, late last year, as a vocal spokesperson for We Are Not Surprised, the pressure group highlighting abuse and misogyny in the artworld. The act of deconstructing power makes one, ironically, pretty powerful.
ArtReview
93 Pawel Althamer, dla tima i burkharda, 2004. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo Jens Ziehe 94 © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London & New York 95 Courtesy National Gallery Singapore 96 Photo: Rafael Martinez
Confident enough that their website is blank apart from an email address, Neuger and Riemschneider are a cornerstone of the Berlin gallery scene: from 1994 onwards, they were instrumental in breaking barely known artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Olafur Eliasson, Tobias Rehberger and Michel Majerus. This year marks 20 years since they moved to their Mitte headquarters, and 25 since they began working with Jorge Pardo, an anniversary celebrated by a recent show. Elsewhere in the programme were thoughtful group shows on negation and the construction of selfhood, a loopily cerebral Mario García Torres exhibition involving an animatronic tortoise and performances by Austrian screen legend Helmut Berger, a stormily politicised James Benning presentation and, demonstrating that Neuger and Riemschneider won’t be pinned down, a display of paintings by Billy Childish.
97 Patrick D. Flores
98 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes, & Matthew Wood
Curator Filipino NEW
97 Photo: Nana Buxani 98 Courtesy Paulo Nazareth 99 Photos: Jonathan Hökklo. Courtesy Frieze, London 100 Photo: Nanda Lanfranco
The curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center of the University of the Philippines, in Quezon City, Manila, where he is also professor of art studies, has over the past several years established himself as a leading curator of and thinker about contemporary art in his native Philippines (in 2015 Flores curated the Philippines’ return to the Venice Biennale after a 51-year absence) and in Southeast Asia more generally. On home turf he curated exhibitions exploring the recent history of art from his native land, as well as Ties of History: Art in Southeast Asia, marking the end of the 50th-anniversary year of the ASEAN states. Further afield he was one of the curators of this year’s inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale, and this past April he was confirmed as artistic director of next year’s Singapore Biennale, a platform that should enable Flores to further explore his investigations into what the diverse forms of contemporary art from Southeast Asia are and could be.
99 Ari Emanuel, Victoria Siddall, Amanda Sharp & Matthew Slotover
Gallerists Brazilian / Brazilian / American Last Year 91 Back when it was an exclusively São Paulo-based outfit, the trio’s modus operandi for Mendes Wood DM was to represent young Brazilian artists, and occasionally do shows with international visitors. They’ve had a full year to settle into the Brussels outpost they opened in 2017, which, along with their continued presence in New York, has signalled a slight shift in direction. Three new artists, none of them Brazilian, have entered the family: Antwerp-based Nigerian Otobong Nkanga (who debuted a show in Brussels in September), Berlin-based Swede Nina Canell (who showed in São Paulo at the tail end of last year) and Guatemalan Naufus RamírezFigueroa. Their artist list is beginning to match the internationalism of the three-strong gallery network, but bringing younger Brazilian artists to overseas attention remains the heft of their work: Lucas Arruda, the gallery’s breakout star, made shows for both their South American and European spaces.
100 Jenny Holzer Artist American New
Art Fair Directors American/British/British/British Last Year 97 With Frieze art fairs, set up by Sharp and Slotover, now majority-owned by Endeavour, the LA entertainment giant headed by Emanuel, it was only a matter of time before the brand, which runs Frieze London and Frieze Masters (in London) and Frieze New York (where an overheating tent prompted a 10 percent rebate of fees to exhibitors) under Siddall’s direction, turned its attention further west. In February Frieze announced a new LA edition, slated for February 2019, to be held at Paramount Studios, a boutique affair (60 or so galleries, against the 150-plus behemoths of London and New York). But size is only one factor when considering the synergies that beckon: after all, if you can get Pharrell Williams to turn up for your breakfast briefing, it won’t be B-listers shopping.
Recent attempts to shift power in the artworld away from its traditional concentrations through the formation of collectives and new networks of distribution have a patron saint in Jenny Holzer. The feminist artist – whose early ‘inflammatory essays’ were fly-posted across New York, who has commissioned billboards, projected slogans onto buildings and used a major newspaper supplement to highlight the wartime abuse of women – has spent four decades pioneering ways to reach audiences beyond the artworld and to effect change within it. In 2018 this took the form of the Anti-Gun Truck, which, adorned with phrases such as ‘Duck and Cover’ and ‘Too Late Now’, toured the US. Her influence was recognised in the adaptation of her ‘truism’ that the ‘Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise’ by pressure group We Are Not Surprised. Whether or not those efforts have long-term impacts, Holzer will continue to offer a model for art as direct action.
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The 2018 Power 100
1 David Zwirner
35 François Pinault
69 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong
2 Kerry James Marshall
36 Pamela Joyner
70 Klaus Biesenbach
3 #MeToo
37 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi
71 Liam Gillick
4 Hito Steyerl
38 Maja Hoffmann
72 Koyo Kouoh
5 Ai Weiwei
39 Jay Jopling
73 Haegue Yang
6 Iwan & Manuela Wirth
40 Ralph Rugoff
74 Marina Abramović
7 Hans Ulrich Obrist
41 Cao Fei
75 Tom Eccles
8 Thelma Golden
42 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
76 Claire Hsu
9 Eyal Weizman
43 Sadie Coles
77 Yuko Hasegawa
10 Fred Moten
44 Joan Jonas
11 Wolfgang Tillmans
45 Philippe Parreno
78 Delfina Entrecanales & Aaron Cezar
12 Pierre Huyghe
46 Adrian Cheng
13 Glenn D. Lowry
47 Stefan Kalmár
14 David Hammons
48 Daniel Buchholz
15 Michael Govan
49 Adrian Piper
16 Yayoi Kusama
50 Kara Walker
17 Maria Balshaw
51 Manuel Borja-Villel & João Fernandes
18 Nan Goldin 19 Adam D. Weinberg 20 Miuccia Prada 21 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
52 Esther Schipper 53 Anselm Franke 54 Emmanuel Perrotin 55 Christine Tohmé
79 Luisa Strina 80 Bose Krishnamachari & Anita Dube 81 Ute Meta Bauer 82 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo 83 Richard Chang 84 Cecilia Alemani 85 Matthew Higgs 86 Almine Rech 87 Arthur Jafa 88 Pablo León de la Barra 89 Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
22 Larry Gagosian
56 William Kentridge
23 Paul B. Preciado
57 Lorenz Helbling
24 Marc Spiegler
58 Adam Szymczyk
25 Massimiliano Gioni
59 Eli & Edythe Broad
26 Gavin Brown
60 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang
93 Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider
27 Marian Goodman
61 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
94 John Akomfrah
28 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 29 Marc Glimcher 30 Theaster Gates 31 Bernard Arnault
62 Thaddaeus Ropac 63 Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani 64 Kader Attia 65 Simon Njami
90 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 91 Massimo De Carlo 92 Wang Wei & Liu Yiqian
95 Eugene Tan 96 Vanessa Carlos 97 Patrick D. Flores 98 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood
32 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty
66 Sunjung Kim
33 Christine Macel
67 Donna Haraway
99 Amanda Sharp, Matthew Slotover, Victoria Siddall & Ari Emanuel
34 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto
68 Hyun-Sook Lee
100 Jenny Holzer
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Venture Galleries Far from heralding the end of a diverse gallery ecosystem, the age of the mega-gallery offers myriad opportunities for reinvention. Possibly. Here are a few of them by Jonathan T.D. Neil
from top David Zwirner in conversation with Robin Pogrebin at The New York Times’ Art Leaders Network, Berlin, 2018; Vanessa Carlos at the 2017 Art Business Conference in London, courtesy the Art Business Conference; Alain Servais speaking at Art Stage Singapore’s Southeast Asia Forum, 2017
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ArtReview
from top Martha Rosler, photo: Bartosz Górka; Stefan Simchowitz in Artsy’s The Art Market, Explained, 2016, © Artsy; Clare McAndrew from Arts Economics presenting the TEFAF Art Market Report 2015, Maastricht, photo: Loraine Bodewes
During the past few years we have seen a number of art market There are other familiar but less well publicised cost-side stratcommentators raise the alarm over midlist art-gallery closures. (By egies of which galleries have availed themselves, including cost‘midlist’ I mean neither the megagalleries nor the scrappy newcomers, sharing for legal, accounting and logistics services that are duplicated but the standard single-location shop with 15–20 artists on the roster across businesses and for which syndicates can exercise more sway and more than a few years in the trenches.) Economist Clare McAndrew in price negotiations. But cost-side strategies can only take a gallery and collector Alain Servais are just a few of the well-informed hand- business so far. Travel far enough down the path of cost-cutting and wringers taking to their keyboards to call out the ‘threats’ to the gallery service-sharing and the signposts start pointing to ‘austerity’ and ecosystem coming from the ‘superstar’ and ‘winner-take-all’ artworld ‘precarity’ as much as they do to collaborative utopias and mytholoeconomics that favour the big, well-capitalised megagalleries. Market gies of the commons. jeremiads all wag a finger at art fairs, which are indispensable sales and Of course revenue isn’t easy to come by. And real solutions networking platforms that galleries can ill afford to do without, even for how to generate more of it for galleries have been few and far between. One of the more creative as many galleries can barely afford to do with. And there are macroThat there is some sort of crisis or existential proposals on this side of the ledger economic devils: income inequalwas suggested some time ago by threat facing the contemporary art gallery ity, the disappearing middle-class Servais, who looked to profesand its business model smacks of histrionics. sional sports, FIFA’s transfer-fee art consumer, increasingly expensive real estate in the highly desirChanging tastes, new technology and a truly system in particular, as a model for able global metropoles, to name how smaller galleries – the farm global marketplace are all conspiring to create teams – who foster not-yet-superjust a few. new opportunities as well as challenges star artists could be remunerated That there is some sort of crisis when those artists achieve superor existential threat facing the contemporary art gallery and its business model smacks of histri- star status and jump to a megagallery (presuming those farm-team onics, however. Changing collector tastes and habits, new technology galleries don’t already have silent, or not-so-silent, partnerships with and a truly global marketplace are all conspiring to create new oppor- the big players, as many do). tunities as well as challenges for gallerists. Because this is business, Practically speaking, anyone familiar with the free-agency landthough, the responses will necessarily fall on one or the other side of scape of professional sports knows what those contracts look like: the cost (saving) versus revenue (generating) divide. And to date, most lengthy and costly; and anyone familiar with the primary market for visual art knows that it never met a contract that it didn’t roll its eyes of the proposals have looked to the cost side of the ledger only. For example, the shared-services model, of which Vanessa at between handshakes. It’s a trust system, but more Eastern Promises Carlos’s Condo initiative is the most visible instance, is a cost-saving than Airbnb. strategy. With Condo, galleries gain access to new-to-them but The pro-athlete comparison suffers from an even more serious already existing markets of collectors and curators in other cities conceptual error, however, which is that athletes are, at bottom, by partnering with host galleries who share their already-paid- performers; they’re not paid-for products, as most artists, and all for space and networks. The organisers claim that the cost savings galleries, are. When an artist goes mega, they aren’t courted with allow galleries to take more risks in presenting more adventurous multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts that just need signing. (read less market-friendly) art, which may be the case, but that’s They’re courted with the promise – speculative though it may be – an expected loss in revenue coupled with a cut in costs, leaving the that their work will now be made available – as if it weren’t before – ledger at status quo ante. to a new class of collectors with a different kind of purchasing power. David Zwirner’s proposal that The medium is the merchanmegagalleries pay something akin The conventional practice by which an artist dise, not how the artist makes it. to an art-fair ‘tax’ in order to subsiWhich also reveals the less lawyergives work to a gallery, which then sells it, keep- intensive method by which farmdise less well capitalised galleries’ ing half the revenue, may prove expedient for team galleries may share in the attendance at the fairs is also a cost-side strategy: higher costs for getting an exhibition-making operation up and riches: hold inventory. When an Zwirner (and Hauser & Wirth, and artist makes the jump, likewise do running, but this leaves galleries at the mercy prices for their work. Everybody Pace, etc) equals lower costs for of just about every other player in the game others. Never mind that art fairs wins. It will be objected however such as Art Basel already utilise that this requires capital. And cost differentials to subsidise their special presentation sections (Art indeed it does. It also points to the biggest blindspot of the gallery Basel in Basel will extend this progressive taxation system to the model today, the one that is holding back the evolution of the midlist central Galleries section next June). gallery and ‘right-sizing’ the larger primary market ecosystem: One imagines that Zwirner’s proposal simply signalled to the fairs consignments. that they can and should be charging more for their prime booths. The conventional practice by which an artist gives work to a Zwirner’s cost-side proposal is the fair’s revenue opportunity. It will gallery, which then sells it and keeps 50 percent of the revenue, may do nothing for most midlist galleries’ revenues and can only be posi- prove expedient for getting an exhibition-making operation up and tioned as a revenue-generating opportunity for first-time attendees running and attracting attention, but the economics of this model leave galleries at the mercy of just about every other player in game. whose presence would be made possible by the Zwirner tax.
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from top  Jerry Maguire, 1996, dir Cameron Crowe; Eastern Promises, 2007, dir David Cronenberg; Trading Places, 1983, dir John Landis
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If the gallery holds no inventory, it cannot benefit from increasing you have a wholly unobjectionable description of what galleries demand for its artists’ works, except by taking on further consign- think they do – except with galleries, it’s all venture and no capital. ments at some future date. The metaphor of the artist/gallerist There was one further attribute my VC interlocutor said was neces‘marriage’ and the vaunted idea that gallerists ‘manage’ their artists’ sary for a founder to gain investment, and that was a plan. A founder’s careers to avoid mercenary market behaviours are really attempts to vision, the strength of her ideas for how to make something new, is a hedge the risk that those future consignments never materialise. In necessary but not sufficient condition for attracting capital support. the interim, collectors are free to sell, and do, often against a gallery’s Founders also need to demonstrate that they know how – that they wishes. Rights of first refusal, sales contracts prohibiting resales, have the know-how – to get from idea to actuality. How many gallerblacklists, all of these things are coercive behavioural practices symp- ists require their artists to have a plan for their work or careers? tomatic of a model in need of retooling. How many even hazard the question? A number of gallerists I have spoken to have discussed building Very few, because broaching such questions transgresses the still their own art funds, in essence third-party-backed inventory, in order closely held belief in the ‘artist’ as an avant-garde figure, one who to ‘compete’ with their collectors. Call it a ‘capital fund’. What comes is of but not within the dominant mode of her society, and whose with it is the return of the dealer model that launched the modern art works stand in opposition to that society, or outrun it. At best the market and that most of the best gallerists have always maintained. idea of an artist bearing a strategic plan smacks of crass ambition and Jeffrey Deitch can afford to put on cutting-edge shows and take risks in professionalisation – that system of norms and mores by which we the gallery, so the story goes, because he is dealing Impressionists out workers must abide but from which artists should be blessedly free. of the back office. Many a gallerist will tell you that it’s the secondary Professionalisation is the answer to the question, recently posed by the artist Martha Rosler, ‘Why are people being so nice?’ – ‘niceness’ market that keeps the lights on and the staff paid. So why not bring the secondary market closer to the primary, and being just one more neoliberal imperative that needs resisting. disaggregate the exhibition function from the dealing function altoWere contemporary art galleries to follow the VC model, they would gether? Love him or hate him, Stefan Simchowitz has built a success- require of their artists a plan for how each creative practice would develop, who its audience would be, ful business model around just this kind of strategy. The social media For Simco, supporting artists means buying to which markets it might appeal and what institutional relationships posturing, promotion and press covwork. After that, gallery shows, production would be important to develop or erage are brilliant marketing, for him funds or institutional contacts and exhibi- even necessary to the advancement and ‘his’ artists, but it’s not the core of the work. Given such a plan, with business, which is dealing, to put it tions arise as much out of self-interest as its benchmarks for recognition and plainly. For Simco, supporting art‘support’ for the artist; and that’s OK, be- success – only in the artworld is there ists means buying work. After that, gallery shows, production funds cause each party’s interests are well aligned cynicism enough to denounce such or institutional contacts and exhivalues – a gallery would then invest bitions arise as much out of self-interest as ‘support’ for the artist; in the work, by buying it. If, for whatever reason, the desired outcomes don’t materialise, the investment ends. Artist and gallery move on. and that’s OK, because each party’s interests are well aligned. Capitalisation and disaggregation point to a different industry What is more, now freed from being a de facto sales representathat could prove useful to moving the contemporary art gallery’s tive of one’s work, which the consignment model all but mandates, business model away from consignments. A few weeks ago I moder- the artist can adopt whatever stance towards society she wishes ated a discussion between an artist and a venture capitalist who had (provided that stance is part of her plan). In this light, professionalisacome together to discuss the cultures of art and tech and related tion, even the friction-free social intercourse subtended by our being matters. That conversation was illuminating for a host of reasons, but ‘nice’ to one another, now appears, for the artist at least, as a feature of it was the parallels between the venture capital firm and the contem- the consignment model’s minimise-risk, minimise-capital strategy, porary art gallery that struck me as salient. Midsize VC firms typically rather than as an unfortunate bug. invest in about 20 ventures, with the full expectation that two, maybe I have no doubt that my proposal for what we might call a ‘venture three will carry the day and generate the desired returns. Most mid- gallery’ will be met with the requisite amount of disgust from an artworld establishment that – still, today – cannot stomach the list galleries will recognise these numbers. Similarly, VC firms invest in founders. Building a new venture is language of investment and returns, of capital and risk. As the recent undeniably a creative practice. The values of the VC firm will neces- Banksy stunt demonstrates, the artworld loves nothing more than sarily be reflected in the founders it chooses to fund and the visions to hate the market, to laugh at its supposed humiliations. So what I in which it chooses to invest. VC firms, the good ones at least, under- have suggested here will be regarded as yet another gross overreach of stand this, and they are committed to funding the visions that stand market thinking into a precinct of value that must be defended from a chance of creating transformative change. The best VCs want to see capital’s coercive march through our imaginations. culture changed for the better. They are committed to the advanceTo this I would simply state: galleries are businesses and always ment of their fields, to making a difference that makes a difference. have been. This is their native discourse. If business is bad, change Replace ‘founder’ with ‘artist’ and ‘vision’ with ‘art’ in the above and the conversation. ar
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Art and photo credits on the cover and on pages 105, 107, 113, 122, 123, 133, 139 Kara Walker, Notes Drawn by a Negress After a Long Absence (details), 2016, from a set of 62 drawings, gouache, ink and graphite on paper. © the artist. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co and Sprüth Magers
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Words on the spine and on pages 45, 67 and 103 come from Peter Cook, ‘Ordinary Man’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960), in Tragically I was an Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook (London, 2002)
on page 144 photography by Mikael Gregorsky
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In Memoriam 29 Oct Richard Hambleton, Canadianborn New York street artist, who became synonymous with the booming 1980s art market 29 Oct Linda Nochlin, feminist art historian, best known for her 1971 article ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ 9 Nov Shannon Michael Cane, art-zine producer and manager of the Printed Matter book fairs since 2013 1 Dec Enrico Castellani, onetime associate of the Brigate Rossi who went on to become a leading figure of the Zero art movement 22 Dec Tim Rollins, American artist who brought together a group of disadvantaged teenagers in the Bronx to form ‘Tim Rollins and the Kids of Survival’ to much acclaim 2 Jan Betty Woodman, experimental ceramics artist, whose work played on colour and form 17 Jan Ed Moses, abstract painter and central figure in a West Coast art scene that orbited the Ferus Gallery 20 Jan Jack Whitten, American artist whose unconventional, process-based paintings of abstract cosmologies won him admirers late in life 28 Jan Robert Pincus-Witten, art critic, curator and art historian who coined the term ‘post-minimalism’ 12 Feb Jef Geys, influential Belgian conceptual artist whose work spanned photography, painting, sculpture, films, installation art and publishing
2 Mar Gillo Dorfles, Italian critic and artist who pioneered and promoted Concrete art
31 Jul Oksana Shachko, Ukrainian artist who cofounded the FEMEN feminist activist group
11 Apr Gillian Ayres, British artist known for her vibrant abstract paintings
1 Aug Cui Xiuwen, Chinese conceptual photographer and videomaker
14 Apr Ram Kumar, one of India’s best-known abstract painters, associated with the Progressive Artists Group
1 Aug Antonio Dias, Brazilian artist and leading figure in the Nova Figuração movement, which used art to undermine the Brazilian military junta
24 Apr Terje Brofos (aka Hariton Pushwagner), Norwegian Pop artist best known for his 2008 graphic novel Soft City 25 Apr Laura Aguilar, American photographer known for her selfportraits and depictions of marginalised communities 9 May Per Kirkeby, Danish neo-expressionist whose semiabstract landscapes were influenced by his training as a geologist 14 May Tom Wolfe, author of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and The Painted Word (1975)
1 Sep Irving Petlin, politically committed American artist known for his figurative pastel works 7 Sep Mohsen Vaziri, Iranian painter and pioneer of modernist abstraction
15 May Georg Kargl, pioneering Austrian gallerist, cofounder of Galerie Metropol and later founder of Georg Kargl Fine Arts
10 Sep Paul Virilio, French philosopher and cultural theorist, whose writing on technology, aesthetics and warfare were particularly influential on latetwentieth-century art
19 May Robert Indiana, American Pop artist, best known for his iconic ‘LOVE’ sculptures
17 Sep Annette Michelson, American film critic and theorist of visual culture, cofounder of the journal October
1 Jun Malcolm Morley, winner of the inaugural Turner Prize and pioneer of both photorealism and neo-expressionism
18 Sep Robert Venturi, American architect and pioneer of Postmodernism
2 Jun Irving Sandler, American art critic who chronicled the advent of Abstract Expressionism 25 Jun David Goldblatt, South African photographer best known for his depictions of the apartheid era
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22 Aug Krishna Reddy, Indian printmaker, sculptor and pioneer of Modernism who was educated in schools set up by Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rabindranath Tagore, studied with Henry Moore and Constantin Brâncuşi, before eventually heading the printmaking department at New York University
ArtReview
19 Sep Geta Bra�tescu, influential Romanian artist who found international fame in later life with a practice spanning drawing, collage, photography, performance, illustration and film
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