Verge Magazine by Jill Hannay

NO. 1 JANUARY 2014

ART TO THE EDGES

JAMES TURRELL

Incredible Lightness

$18 usa/can

VERGE.COM

JENNY HOLZER: Under Investigation DO HO SUH’S Floating Kingdom MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ A Deeper Look

Tadanori Yokoo, Poster, 1964 - 1968. Courtesy of the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art

A R T TO T H E E D G E S

Verge Magazine is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art and visual culture. Featuring up-to-the-minute visual material, fresh faces and original voices, we are the definitive voice for new and established talent in contemporary visual culture. Spanning twenty-five countries and six continents, Verge covers the art world from edge to edge. With in-depth articles and artist spotlights every issue, Verge connects you to the inner workings of today's great living artists and arts institutions. This magazine is a student project created for the Graphic Design Program at Seattle Central Creative Academy. All content has been sourced for educational purposes, without the knowledge of the owners. I am grateful for the massive amount of creativity and effort represented within these pages. This issue, we're focusing on light: as a medium, as an environment, and as a vehicle to communicate ideas. We were honored to spend time with James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, Do Ho Suh and Marina Abramovic, and are featuring five outstanding artists to watch in our spotlight series. Sincerely, Jill Hannay Editor-in-Chief

columns

In Memoriam: Ruth Asawa What Is Creativity?

12 14

artist spotlight Kara Walker

Andreas Gursky Tadanori Yokoo Evan Blackwell Yayoi Kusama

20 22 24 26

features

Marina Abramović: T he Art Of Being Present Do–Ho Suh’s Floating Kingdom J ames Turrell's Incredible Lightness Letters To The Government: Investigating Jenny Holzer

32 40 52 60

reviews

Richard Mosse's Hypercolor Congo 70 Doug Aitken: Station To Station 72 Artguide 74 Next Issue: Stopping Time 78

contents

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

KARA WALKER

“The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.”

for display at the Art Institute Chicago. The installation, titled Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! (2013), will include five large framed graphite drawings and 40 small framed mixed-media drawings along with the cut paper silhouettes. The title refers to comments made by Barack Obama in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, about the challenges of community organizing in Chicago, in which he quotes the Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey (1887–1940). Merging handwritten text with the images in the drawings, the work takes a diaristic form that revolves around The Turner Diaries, written in 1978 by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce, and investigates the notion of the “race war” as it exists in the contemporary imagination. Walker has referred to the work in progress as, “a kind of paranoid panorama wall work — with supplemental drawings large and small, to chronicle what can be called a diary of my ever-present, never-ending war with race.”

Kara Walker is best known for cut-paper silhouettes that critically address race, gender, sexuality, and power. Most often taking the form of large-scale tableaux of antebellum stereotypes, they present slavery as an absurd theater of eroticized violence and self-deprecating behavior. Her flat caricatures — mammies, sambos, slave mistresses, masters, and Southern belles — are depicted nearly life-size, arranged in narrative sequences that further exaggerate the already grotesque history of slavery. For Walker, the simplified details of a human form in the black cutouts resonate with racial stereotypes. She has said, “the silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.” Walker has, over the years, pursued the silhouette’s implications and transformations in paintings, drawings, collages, shadow puppets, cut steel, film and video animations, and “magic-lantern” projections. She will return to the cut-paper medium in monumental form for a new commissioned installation that she has designed especially

Kara Walker, Untitled, 2001-2005. Collage on paper, Courtesy of the Artist

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

ANDREAS GURSKY

Andreas Gursky, Kuwait Stock Exchange, 2000. Courtesy of Sotheby's of London

"My preference for clear structures is the result of my desire - perhaps illusory to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world."

Photographer Andreas Gursky’s work is characterized by the tension between the clarity and formal nature of his photographs and the ambiguous intent and meaning they present, occasioned by their insertion into a ‘high-art’ environment. It is comparable to that of contemporaries such as Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer, all of whom were influenced by the documentary approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher. During the 1980s and 1990s Gursky’s work took on an increasingly global range of subjects, and he presented his images on an ever larger scale. Through all his work runs a sense of impersonality, a depiction of the structures and patterns of collective existence, often represented by the unitary behavior of large crowds. His images of the stock exchanges of North America and East Asia are exemplary in the way that he uses crowds to create a type of picture

comparable in formal terms to the ‘all-over’ compositions of the Abstract Expressionist painters. In the early 1990s Gursky used this format to represent grand urban landscape vistas in the Far East, juxtaposing different urban zones and suggesting an interplay between the zones of leisure and commerce. This theme was also taken up in his photographs depicting Prada shop displays, for instance in o.T.V., in which assorted training shoes are lined up in an austere Minimalist display. Gursky’s distance from Cartier-Bresson’s dictum of the ‘decisive moment’ and his concomitant rejection of the truth of the candid image is underlined by his use of digital manipulation. Gursky lives and works in Düsseldorf.

“In principle, I’m very close to the event and at the same time my pictures are no longer in the real world.”

Andreas Gursky, Shanghai, 2004. Courtesy of Sotheby's of London

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

TADANORI YOKOO “And when I recognize the source…I gain confidence in what I am doing. It’s like a link has been formed between that time in the past and the time when I am there in the studio painting. The past and the present become one.”

Instead of following Modernism’s mantra of simplicity and function-over-form, Tadanori Yokoo introduced into his commercial posters and advertising graphic elements from his childhood: His text was reminiscent of the old kimono fabric labels of his childhood; his graphics were influenced by children’s card games from the pre–war period. Yokoo’s original approach won him fans in Japan’s avant-garde circles — the locale of creators such as the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima, the butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata and the playwright Shuji Terayama, for whom he made posters for theatrical productions. Yokoo also gained a following overseas — being feted with a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1972. It was the first time that a living graphic designer had been given a solo exhibition at the hallowed institution. Yokoo is one of the stars at this year’s Yokohama Triennale. “As I try putting various different colored lines on the white canvas, I then think, and then fill in the colors. Then I will suddenly jump from one side of the painting to the other, and suddenly think “No, this is no good” — and then without realizing it I might find myself doing a different style of painting to what I had done before. Then I might think, “OK, let’s make the whole thing consistent with that style of painting.” So from moment to moment the work is changing. And it’s not me who is causing those changes. It is the painting itself. It’s like I am feeling the painting, sympathizing with the painting, adapting to the painting. I’m collaborating with the painting. I feel that very strongly these days. As I paint them I remember them. “Ah, yes, this was when I was a child and it was pitch black and I got scared and ran home.” And when I recognize the source, then I might make the painting an even deeper black. I gain confidence in what I am doing. It’s like a link has been formed between that time in the past and the time when you are there in the studio painting. The past and the present become one.”

Tadanori Yokoo, Bangalore, 2000 Courtesy of the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art

Tadanori Yokoo, Posters, 1964 - 1968. Courtesy of the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Evan Blackwell, Disposable Heroes, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist

Evan Blackwell, Intersection, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist

EVAN BLACKWELL

Sculptor and ceramics artist Evan Blackwell's work ranges from site-specific projects and installations in public places to small, functional objects. Beginning with early training in ceramics, his artwork has evolved into an inventive reuse and repurposing of such things as salvaged building supplies, disposable products and post-consumer waste. "I rework material â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to generate transformation by rearranging our idea of the familiar." Working to capture the cycles of growth, decay, and renewal over time, his work sheds light on the process of reclamation. Guided by interests in ecology and sustainable urban infrastructure, he demonstrates inventive alternatives to single-use consumer habits. Over the past 15 years, Blackwell has created numerous site-responsive art projects and exhibitions, guiding each project from research, presentation and budget management to design, fabrication and installation. These projects have required collaboration with artists, selection committees, project managers, architects, engineers, safety professionals and union workers. Communication, cooperation, and attention to detail have been essential. His work is integrated into specific environments to activate them; in return the space and the viewer activate the work. By building systems that inform, educate and inspire creative repurposing and reuse, Blackwell sparks curiosity, imagination, connection and conversation, extending an invitation to people of all interests and socioeconomic backgrounds to engage and participate in the transformation of public spaces into thriving examples of human ecology.Â

Evan Blackwell, Boom Bust Installation, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist

â&#x20AC;&#x153;By building systems that inspire creative repurposing and reuse, I seek to spark curiosity, imagination, connection and conversation."

Evan Blackwell, Oil Can, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

YAYOI KUSAMA “Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots we become part of the unity of our environments.”

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Room, 2013, Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery

Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration No. 2, 2013, Courtesy of Tate Modern

Though she was generally unknown just months ago, fame is not new to Yayoi Kusama. There was a time when she was as well-known as Andy Warhol among admirers of Pop Art. Acknowledged as a progenitor of Minimalism, Kusama made headlines for street performances in which she painted polka dots on nude men and women. But Kusama was largely forgotten by the art world after she returned to Japan in 1973, suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. She was committed to a mental institution, where she remains to this day. Kusamaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s neglect by art history has been redressed in a traveling retrospective of her seminal 1960s work, currently at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. When the retrospective was on view in New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Museum of Modern Art, shock waves of recognition went through the art world. Not only was Kusama relevant to the past; she seemed to pave the way for 1990s art as well. The retrospective will soon conclude its tour in Tokyo, where Japanese audiences will have their first comprehensive look at an artist now considered to be their foremost modernist. Even now, rumors about Kusama abound (yes, her many lovers included Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd; no, she is not faking mental illness to gain attention). In our conversations via fax, Kusama and I were separated by language, culture, and a couple of generations. Nevertheless, she steered me past the pitfalls of innuendo and legend in my effort to understand how her remarkable life relates to her art.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Room, 2013, Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery

MARINA ´ ABRAMOVICĆ:

the art of being present Seductive, fearless, and outrageous, Marina Abramović has challenged the definition of art for nearly forty years. Using her own body as a vehicle, pushing herself beyond her physical and mental limits – and at times risking her life in the process – she creates performances that challenge, shock, and move us. Sarah Lyall asks the 'Grandmother of Performance Art' about her life, work and the future of art.

Words by Sarah Lyall Photographs by Sébastien Micke

“All the aggressive actions I do to myself I would never dream of doing in my own life — I am not this kind of person. I cry if I cut myself peeling potatoes. I am taking the plane, there is turbulence, I am shaking. In performance, I become, somehow, like not a mortal. All my insecurities — having a fat body, skinny body, big ass, long nose, being abandoned, whatever — aren’t important."

arina Abramović has never been shy about her age — when she turned sixty, she celebrated with a black-tie gala at the Guggenheim Museum — and age has been kinder to her than she has ever been to herself. You would recognize her today from the grainy photographs of her earliest performances, forty years ago, when she was a dark, offbeat girl with sad eyes and chiseled features in a pale face. Perhaps it was too expressive a face to be pretty — the obdurate and the yielding at odds in it. But some charismatic women, like Abramović, or her idol Maria Callas, are beautiful by an act of will. At sixty-three, Abramović radiates vitality and seduction. Her glossy hair spills over her broad shoulders. When she isn’t dressed for exercise or the stage, she is likely to be wearing designer clothes. She is fleshier than she used to be, and her body has a different kind of poignancy than it did in her waifish youth, but she still has no qualms about subjecting it to shocking trials. Last August, Abramović invited me to observe a five-day retreat that she held at her country home in the Hudson Valley. The main house, built in the nineteen-nineties, sits on a rise overlooking some twenty-five acres of meadows, orchards, and woodland. Its design was inspired by a star-shaped castle on the Baltic. Abramović bought the property in 2007. Even though the star has six points, and the Red star that dominated her childhood, and which figures prominently in her iconography, is a pentagram, she felt that destiny had led her to it. The décor is minimal— a few modern sofas and chairs in bright colors — and the walls are bare. Until recently, she spent weekends here with her second husband, Paolo Canevari, an Italian sculptor and video artist seventeen years her junior. They met in Europe, in 1997, and divided their time between her canal house in Amsterdam and his apartment in Rome. In 2001, they moved to a loft in SoHo. After twelve years together, two of them married, they divorced last December. For the first time, Abramović has learned to drive. “I did it to be independent,” she explained. Her timidity and ineptitude behind the wheel seem incongruous in the character of a daredevil, but, she added, “I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them.”

museum. It involves a naked couple planted like caryatids on either side of a narrow doorway at the entrance to a gallery, their backs to the frame. Everyone who enters must sidle past them, deciding which body to face. MoMA will provide an alternative access to the space, an accommodation that Abramović thinks is a pity. Her role as an artist, she believes, with a hubris that can sound naïve and a humility that disarms any impulse to resent it, is to lead her spectators through an anxious passage to a place of release from whatever has confined them. Grace and stamina were prime criteria for the “reperformers” Abramović had chosen for the retrospective, and, judging from their looks, so was the kind of ethereal shimmer that painters once

Abramović's intensive workshop in hygiene and movement, which she calls “Cleaning the House," will use Ayurvedic, shamanistic, Buddhist, Gurdjieffian, and other holistic or ascetic practices to initiate her students. The participants were mostly young men and women whom she had chosen to participate in a full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present — the first such honor for a performance artist — which opens on March 14th. They will be reenacting five of the approximately ninety pieces that she has created since 1969, including three originally performed with the German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), her former lover and collaborator. Imponderabilia, a joint work of 1977, will include live, indeed interactive, nudity — another first for the

I cry if I cut myself peeling potatoes. I looked for in models for sacred art. am taking the plane, there is turbulence, Many are dancers; some teach yoga I am shaking. In performance, I become, or Pilates; others are performance somehow, like not a mortal. All my inseartists eager to début at MoMA, curities — having a fat body, skinny body, and to work with a master. They big ass, long nose, a guy, being abandoned, arrived on a chartered bus, and whatever — aren’t important.” What makes Abramović greeted each of them it art? Context and intention, she said: with a maternal kiss, then confiscated their cell phones. They had signed a contract that obliged them “The sense of purpose I feel to do something heroic, legendary, and to observe complete silence; to fast on green tea and water; to sleep on transformative; to elevate viewers’ spirits and give them courage. If the hard floor of an old barn; and to submit to her discipline, which I can go through the door of pain to embrace life on the other side, they can, too.” is partly that of a guru, partly of a drill sergeant. Abramović’s feminism has always been a mythical, rather than a While Abramović’s stand-ins are performing, in rotating shifts, on the sixth floor of the museum, she will present a new work, The Artist political, understanding of women’s oppression — and of their power. Is Present, in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. From RoseLee Goldberg, a leading curator and historian of performance opening time to closing — eight to ten hours a day — for seventy-seven art, noted that for American women of Abramović’s generation days, until the show ends, on May 31st, she will sit immobile at a bare “being a feminist meant joining the party. That kind of solidarity — or wooden table, gazing fixedly into space. Her original concept for the of conformity — signified something different to Marina. By the time piece involved an elaborate scaffold and props, but as she refined it she became an artist, she wanted freedom on her own terms. And I with Klaus Biesenbach, a close friend and MoMa's chief curator at large, always saw her in the pieces with Ulay as being in charge.” Most of Abramović’s peers among the pioneers of what might its showy elements and verticality were discarded. The Artist Is Present was the longest durational work ever mounted be called “ordealism,” to distinguish it from tamer or more cerebral in a museum. Members of the audience participated by sitting in forms of Conceptual and performance art, have long since retired a chair opposite Abramović’s. “What you can and can’t control is from their harrowing vocation, and some died young. Acconci, who part of the piece,” Abramović said. “Electricity fails, nobody shows stopped performing in 1973 (he turned to architecture), told me, up — doesn’t matter. If you are not one hundred per cent in the now, “What I loved about performance was the contract. You say you are going to do something and you carry it out. What I hated about it the public, like a dog, knows it. They leave.” The one given is the “enormous bodily pain” that Abramović knows was the display of self — the personality cult.” He saw Abramović’s she will suffer — “especially at the beginning. Motionless performances The House with the Ocean View, he said, “and I had no idea how to are the hardest.” Pain is the constant in her art. (Only rarely has she enjoy it. Why did she need an audience to validate a private experiaborted a performance, although once the audience intervened to ence? Are the people really into it with her?” He also questions the save her life. This happened in 1974, at the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, where she performed a piece called Rhythm 5. She lost consciousness inside the perimeter of a burning star, and was dragged to safety.) She has screamed until she lost her voice, danced until she collapsed, and brushed her hair until her scalp bled. In an early piece, she ingested anti-psychotic drugs that caused temporary catatonia. She and Ulay traded hard slaps, hurled themselves at solid walls, and passed a breath back and forth, with locked lips, until they fainted. He pointed an arrow at her heart as she tensed the bow. These performances were works of dynamic sculpture, with a formal rigor and beauty, but what, I asked her, distinguished their content from masochism? “Funny, my mother asked the same question,” she replied. “All the aggressive actions I do to myself I would never dream of doing in my own life — I am not this kind of person. Marina Abramović and Ulay 1974. Courtesy of Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

Pain is the constant in Abramović's art. In 1974, while performing a piece called Rhythm 5, she lost consciousness inside the perimeter of a burning star, and was dragged to safety. principle of reperformance, a contentious point in the art world. One party holds that the integrity of time-based art is inseparable from its transience, and that no performance can or should be resurrected. In an app-happy age, this radical embrace of loss has its nobility. Abramović has been a prominent target for the purists. Even Ulay recently remarked, “I don’t believe in these performance ‘revivals.’ They don’t have the ring of truth about them. They have become a part of the culture industry.” The credo that he and Abramović lived by in the seventies, “art vital,” called for “no rehearsal, no predicted end, no repetition, extended vulnerability, exposure to chance, primary reactions.” Acconci told me, “Marina now seems to want to make performance teachable and repeatable, but then I don’t understand what separates it from theatre.” Last November, Abramović invited a group of old friends to her sixty-third birthday dinner, in her SoHo loft. It is a luxuriously spare, open space with a fashion plate’s dressing room off the master bath — Abramović’s gift to herself after Paolo Canevari moved out. She likes to cook homey meals, and, in the country, she had gathered vegetables from her organic garden to make a soup for the reperformers when they broke their fast. But on this occasion she had hired a chef, a young artist whose menu had an unusual concept: It was dedicated to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Rum and bourbon were served in paper cups, and after a lengthy cocktail hour the doors to the kitchen were folded back to reveal sixty-three quarts of gumbo in plastic containers. The guests looked somewhat stricken when a posse of couriers arrived to distribute the gumbo to the homeless. While they were wondering when or if something to eat would appear (eventually, it did — okra doughnuts), David Blaine, the magician, did card tricks, and changed the time on Laurie Anderson’s watch from across the room. He is planning his own next feat of ordealism — he will seal himself in a super-sized glass bottle and have it tossed into the ocean. “Marina is one of my greatest inspirations,” he told me. She was in glamour mode, in a clingy black dress and artful makeup, with her hair down. “I want you to meet someone,” she said, and led me to a corner where a giant cherub with a soft, sad face and a disheveled pageboy was leaning against the wall. “This is Antony. He will, I hope, be singing at my funeral.” Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons, is famous for his otherworldly voice. But it is not just his music, I surmised, that Abramović finds so compelling. His fragility is transparent, whereas she has to suffer in public to make hers visible beneath an Amazonian guise. The song he will sing, when she dies, “if all goes well,” she said, is My Way. Then she outlined the program for her farewell performance. It will take place simultaneously in three cities: Belgrade, Amsterdam, and New York. All the mourners will wear bright colors. And in each city there will be a coffin. “No one will know,” she said, “which has the real body.”

DO–HO SUH’S

FLOATING KINGDOM After Korean-born artist Do-Ho Suh

moved to London a few years ago to be with his wife, he missed his adopted home of New York. He kept a 500-square-foot live-in studio there, in a former sailors’ dorm in Chelsea, and began to contemplate ways of memorializing it. Many of Suh’s most famed sculptures had reimagined his homes — in translucent fabric or resin, or as a painstakingly detailed, oversize dollhouse — from his childhood in Seoul and his young adulthood in the United States. This time, though, he wanted to make a drawing. Except Suh was not content to sit in a chair with a pad and pencil and render what he saw. Instead, he covered every inch of the interior — walls, floors, ceiling, refrigerator, window air conditioner — with paper, then rubbed with a blue-colored pencil, the way a child might preserve the memory of a leaf in the fall. Words by Julie L. Belcove Photographs By Taegsu Jeon

“What makes a person a person, and when does a person become a group? What is interpersonal space — space between people?”

“ Rubbing is a different interpretation of space. It’s quite sensuous — very physical and quite sexual,” says Suh, wearing a T-shirt and shorts on a late summer day in his London studio. “You have to very carefully caress the surface and try to understand what’s there.” That dictum could easily apply to the entirety of Suh’s oeuvre, which has explored the varying meanings of space, from the smallest territory we occupy — our clothing — to our homes and homelands. Issues of memory, history, displacement, identity and the body all come into play. In an age of exponentially increasing globalization, Suh’s consideration of what it means to belong strikes a nerve. His almost uncanny ability to hit these major touchstones of our time — and do it with the lyricism of a poet — has made him one of the most internationally in-demand artists of his generation. Suh has fashioned a monumental emperor’s robe from thousands of soldiers’ dog tags and precariously perched a fully furnished house on the edge of a roof seven stories up. He has used his personal history of wearing uniforms — from schoolboy to soldier — as the basis for a self-portrait, and set an army of tiny figurines under a glass floor, inviting viewers to walk on the artwork without necessarily even realizing it. In Suh’s mind, it all has the same origin: “Everything starts from an idea of personal space — what is the dimension

of personal space,” says Suh. “What makes a person a person, and when does a person become a group? What is interpersonal space — space between people?” “The whole approach is quite rich,” says Rochelle Steiner, professor at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, who is working on a book about Suh’s drawings. “He’s been very, very inventive.” With a boyishly round face and a playful grin, Suh looks younger than his 51 years by a decade, but he exudes the seriousness of a veteran artist. It’s a disposition he knows well: His father, Suh Se-ok, is a well-regarded abstract painter in Seoul. After secondary school, the younger Suh had hoped to become a marine biologist, but with a poor math score standing in his way, he applied to art school at the last minute and was accepted. He studied traditional Korean painting before following his first wife, a Korean-American grad student, to the states in 1991. The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) was the only American art school to accept him, and though he’d already earned a master’s degree in Seoul, RISD insisted he enter as a sophomore. Still, immigrating alleviated some of the pressure of being his father’s son. “I felt relieved when I went to the states,” he says. “I felt much more freedom. I realized the danger of having a father like mine — he’s going to always come up — but in the U.S. my father is nobody.”

Do Ho Suh, MoMA Installation 2012,. Courtesy of MoMA

Do Ho Suh, Installation at Venice Biennale 2013 >. Courtesy of the artist.

work was so fantastic. It was ambitious in scale and in the kind Asked how his father regards his success, Suh says, “I’m not of global ideas he was working with.” Coogan, who has remained sure if he feels proud of me. I don’t know if he feels competition. close to Suh, adds, “Do Ho is exploring issues of what divides us He doesn’t show those things.” and what unites us as human beings.” At RISD, Suh couldn’t get into the classes he most wanted In 1997, Suh scored a show at New York gallery Gavin to take and ended up enrolling in The Figure in Contemporary Brown’s Enterprise before earning an MFA from Yale and moving Sculpture. “It changed the course of my life,” Suh says, adding that to Manhattan. As he continued to exhibit the professor, Jay Coogan, “is responsible new work, his hauntingly powerful pieces for my becoming a sculptor.” Presented about the nature of home quickly gained with the first assignment — use clothing notice. He made versions of his parents’ to consider the human condition — Suh house in Seoul — a traditional slope-roofed delved into ideas about the body, a topic hanok, quite out of style when his father that was taboo in Korea. Around the same commissioned a former carpenter at the time, the Rodney King riots erupted in royal palace to build it from reclaimed Los Angeles, and news images of armed wood in the 1970s — in dreamy fabric, Korean immigrants protecting their suspended from a gallery ceiling. “It has an stores made Suh think for the first time interesting narrative,” he says of his childabout how non-Koreans perceived his hood house. “But then, every building, ethnic group. His classmates, he recalls, every space, has that. It’s just not told.” all younger than he, related neither to the JAY COOGAN Using fabric gave the pieces a ghostlike immigrant experience nor to the mandaquality. Viewers were invited to enter some tory military training that every Korean of the installations, heightening the sensaman, himself included, must endure. tion of being in a home, or the memory of one. Suh recalls how his Fastening thousands of army dog tags to a military jacket, Suh brother, an architect, was disconcerted to see strangers wandering created his first major sculpture: Metal Jacket. The modern-day under a version of their family home at a 2000 exhibition at New coat of armor touched on many of the themes — personal space; York’s P.S. 1 museum. the tension between the individual and the group; the inevitable Fallen Star 1/5 (2008–11), one of his best-known works, takes a culture clashes that arise with human migration — that continue to more solid model of that hanok and crashes it through the wall of preoccupy his work, and it also became the prototype for Some/ a carefully furnished, dollhouse-like re-creation of the apartment One, the imposing robe made of dog tags. From a distance, the building where he lived in Providence. Contrary to most viewers’ viewer sees each sculpture as a single silvery surface. Only upon assumptions, his various home pieces are not exact replicas. “It’s closer inspection does it register as a mosaic of dog tags, each intrinsically impossible to make them exact,” he says. “I wanted representing an individual soldier. to achieve something intangible. It’s about memory, time spent in Coogan, now the president of the Minneapolis College of Art the space.” and Design, recalls his reaction to Metal Jacket: “Oh my gosh! His

“Do–Ho is exploring issues of what divides us and what unites us as human beings.”

Do Ho Suh, MoMA Installation 2012,. Courtesy of MoMA

“I wanted to achieve something intangible. It’s about memory, time spent in the space.”

In addition to exploring ideas about culture shock, Suh’s works can have a sense of humor — a house teetering on a roof seems to be winking at The Wizard of Oz — and also a sense of loss. There is, of course, the rubble of the walls in Fallen Star 1/5, but even in a dog tag piece, viewers are left wondering what happened to the tags’ owners, since only in death does a soldier part with the metal identification. Net-Work (2010), which was installed on a Japanese beach for the Setouchi International Art Festival, looks like a fishing net from a distance; only up close is it clear that Suh constructed it from scores of shiny figurines, each one’s arms and legs outstretched to another’s in the shape of an X. The piece was shown during typhoon season, and though the organizers insisted on securing it, Suh would have been content to see it wash away with the tide. “I thought it would be a beautiful thing to happen to the piece — nature comes and takes my piece away, takes it to the ocean, and the work disappears.” Says his longtime friend and fellow artist Janice Kerbel: “The works in a way are like him — they’re these very gentle things, almost like specters. There’s something ethereal about Do Ho — he doesn’t seem to belong to the place he’s in.” In 2010, Suh moved to London to join his second wife, Rebecca Boyle Suh, a British arts educator. Their first daughter was born soon after; their second followed this past summer. “I’ve been following my loves,” Suh says of his continent hopping, adding with a laugh, “it was never a career move.” If anything, London has been tougher to adjust to than the United States. “Things are so different here. I feel like it’s a completely different language, mentality and humor. I miss a lot of American values — like being straightforward and more relaxed.” His life in London revolves around family. He is not one to join the art world social scene. “His commitment to his practice is so intense,” says Kerbel, who is also based in London. “He’s a quiet person and keeps very much to himself. He needs that time to be alone and in his head.” Suh maintains an international practice, taking intercontinental trips two to three times per month, including frequent stints in Korea, where the fabric pieces are sewn. Much of Suh’s sculpture is site-specific, and even when it isn’t, it’s still context-specific. “I have to anchor myself to the context — the physical site or history,” he says. When he was asked to mak e a piece for South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, which is opening a new branch in Seoul this month, Suh considered the location of the museum itself — the site of the former palace — and the gallery the piece will be installed in, an expansive room called the Info-Box that has a view of the palace’s last remains. In response, he created Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home, a small hanok completely encapsulated by Suh’s first American home in Providence. The extra three “homes” in the title refer to the museum, the palace complex and Seoul. At a scale of 1:1, it is the largest fabric sculpture by volume he has ever made.

“It’s an existential question of what we believe in this world — there

are a lot of holes, but we try to believe it’s whole...

There’s a lot of rupture and gap.

Also on his immediate agenda: his first drawings show, at Lehmann Maupin’s two New York galleries. Also on his immediate agenda: his first drawings show, at Lehmann Maupin’s two New York galleries. Slated for September 2014, the dual exhibition will feature excerpts from his Rubbing Projects. (One of the pieces is so big the gallery cannot accommodate the full structure.) Says Steiner, “I’ve never seen anybody use paper and line in such a multifaceted way.” Suh is also making a video-performance piece that considers cooking as a type of personal space: He plays the host of a TV show, with his mother, as the chef, teaching him a recipe. He has recently taken on more architectural assignments as well, conceiving the Korean gallery for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is in discussions to design an actual house in the UK, the details of which are still under wraps. “As my career has developed, I have more opportunities,” Suh says. “That’s the great thing about getting old.” There is an often-overlooked political undercurrent to Suh’s work. For the 2012 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, for example, Suh recalled the massacre of civilians that followed a protest there in 1980. “News was censored, so we didn’t know what was going on,” Suh says. “When I read the newspaper it was a patch of blanks — that never left me. When school started we students heard what happened in Gwangju from students who were there. Everything was fragmented. I was living only four hours away and didn’t understand what was happening — it made me think about the problems of writing history.” In response, Suh made rubbings of three spaces around the city. “That’s a lot of rubbing,” he laughs. He and his crew wore blindfolds for one of the rubbings, both as a means of intensifying the already tactile experience of an unfamiliar place and as a metaphor. “I didn’t want to pretend to know about Gwangju,” he says, offering the analogy of tourists visiting a city’s standard landmarks. “You don’t pay attention to the space between the landmarks, and the way we look at history is the same — we only remember the so-called important historical events.” Therein, Suh says, lies his challenge as an artist. “It’s an existential question of what we believe in this world — there are a lot of holes, but we try to believe it’s whole, the way a lot of people see the house [sculpture] as an exact replica. There’s a lot of rupture and gap. The role of the artist is to see those ruptures.”

The role of the artist

is to see those ruptures.”

Do Ho Suh, MoMA Installation 2012,. Courtesy of MoMA

james turrell's incredible LIGHTNESS

Do Ho Suh, MoMA Installation 2012, Courtesy of MoMA

Do Ho Suh, MoMA Installation 2012,. Courtesy of MoMA

"The works in a way are like him —

they’re these very gentle things, almost

like specters. There’s something ethereal

about Do Ho — he doesn’t seem to belong to the place he’s in.” JANICE KERBEL

james turrell's incredible

L I GHTNE SS 38

Three major museum shows provide an unprecedented chance to assess the optical, intangible, and mesmerizing art of James Turrell. 39

Words by Patricia Failing Photographs by Lara Swimmer

Previous page: James Turrell, Aten Reign, 2013, Guggenheim Museum, New York Opposite: MFAH SkySpace

In an unusual and unprecedented tribute to a single living American artist, three major U.S. art museums in three distinct cities have simultaneous large-scale exhibitions dedicated to the work of James Turrell. This concurrence not only represents a celebration of the American artist, but also reflects the histories and agendas of three very distinct institutions — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. and philanthropists are among Turrell’s major supporters, and the MFAH owns the largest museum collection of his work in the United States. The holdings include prints, light-based installations and The Light Inside (1999), a permanent 118-foot passageway that connects the museum’s two gallery buildings. Pedestrians pass through this space on a raised walkway as if gliding on a stream of color, enclosed by an almost-tangible field of illumination that slowly shifts from blue to crimson to magenta. Adjacent to the museum, Twilight Epiphany, a five million dollar Turrell Skyspace, recently opened on the Rice University campus. It was gifted to Rice by a local patron. Skyspaces — enclosures with apertures at the top that have been strategically crafted to reveal the local qualities of atmospheric light — have become Turrell’s signature compositions: to date he has created 82 Skyspaces in 26 countries and 21 in the United States. “In my dreams,” the artist says. “At some point it will always be sunrise or sunset at a Turrell Skyspace somewhere on the globe.” The Rice Skyspace, one of the most accessible to the public, can accommodate 120 viewers and features LED lighting programmed to modulate the glow of sunrise and sunset, transforming the sky into planes of color. Turrell distinguishes between his own “architecture of space” — areas inhabited entirely by light — and the architecture of

LACMA has mounted the largest exhibition, a retrospective of the artist’s work from 1966 to 2013, which includes prints, drawings, models, and Turrell’s elusive, hallucinatory installations constructed entirely from white and colored light. A section of the show is devoted to the artist’s Roden Crater project, on which he has worked since 1974, converting a 400,000-year-old dormant volcano near Flagstaff, Arizona, into a naked-eye astronomical observatory and a series of spaces designed to capture celestial phenomena. Born in Los Angeles, Turrell is welcomed at LACMA as a homeboy and major player in the 1960s Los Angeles arts community celebrated in “Pacific Standard Time,” the 2011–12 exhibitions and performances documenting the culture of postwar Los Angeles. Turrell participated in LACMA’s ambitious “Art and Technology” program of the late ’60s, investigating the phenomenology of perception and the effects of sensory deprivation. The LACMA retrospective alludes to these experiments by presenting one of Turrell’s recent “Perceptual Cells,” a freestanding structure designed to offer viewers, one at a time, a profoundly intense and sensual encounter with saturated light. The Turrell survey at the MFAH is largely based on gifts to the museum from the artist’s local patrons. Houston collectors

“I think most of us recognize that light filling a void can be a very powerful experience — a reminder that segregating the literal and what we call the ‘spiritual’ can sometimes be a meaningless distinction.” JAMES TURRELL

form, the actual walls, floors, and ceilings erected to create buildings. The exhibition in New York City conjoins both architectural types, offering an entirely new encounter with Frank Lloyd Wright’s famously eccentric design for the Guggenheim Museum. In the largest installation Turrell has ever mounted — titled Aten Reign, after an Egyptian sun god — the Guggenheim’s central rotunda is visible only from below, and becomes a five-tiered volume of elliptical space suffused with a range of sunset hues or the gray tones of a cloudy day. At the apex of the tower of ellipses is Wright’s skylight, filtered by a scrim. Turrell veiled the skylight’s outer rim to concentrate the daylight, which intermingles with LED lights lining the rings. As the colors gradually meld into one another, the tiers may appear convex, concave, or even as a series of flat concentric rings, as if the light were heavier or lighter in different registers of the space. Executing a 99,000-square-foot suite of simultaneous, complementary exhibitions is a notable accomplishment for the three museums, not to mention what it represents for an individual artist. “The last person on Earth most people imagine to be precisely on time, delivering what he or she has promised, is the artist,” Turrell says. “But when invitations are sent out for an opening at an art museum or gallery, what you see when you arrive is what the artist will be judged on. In this case, we opened three major exhibitions within a span of 28 days. I had wonderful support, but often the greatest thing about such big exhibitions is getting through the openings at the end.” Art historians and critics have oftenentirely been divided between three-dimensional forms constructed from projected those whoending dismiss Turrell’s work with as a New Age techno-spectacle light and chronologically Breathing Light (2013), and those who regard field) his command of optical sciences and a Ganzfeld (complete environment of homogeneous artistic practice a powerful vehicle for raising illumination. Asas with the crater, in which the skyquestions appears toabout constructions of “the real. ” These three exhibitions offer an viewers as a bounded circular dome within the volcano’s bowl, unprecedented opportunity to line up assessments of Turrell’s of these compositions are crafted to demonstrate the “thingness” achievements with almost-comprehensive range of hisexternally work, light and to blur thean distinctions between internally and but the audiences will inevitably be handicapped by what is generated visual experiences. absent–Roden Crater, Turrell’s magnum opus andview the from audacious Rarely shown in photographs, however, is the center his life’s work. within of a Ganzfeld of the space where one enters or exits the field. Most of the nearly 50this works in theappears LACMA In Turrell’s recent work opening asretrospective a solid plane can be related directly or by indirectly to theboundary crater project, of color, surrounded a geometric of LEDbeginning lighting. with Afrum (White), and Juke 1968,a glowing, The splendid effect is1966, very much like(Green), discovering Josef Albers

painting within “the ambiguous world of the undetermined,” as the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon described his own vaporous dreamscapes, a prototype Turrell admires. To enter a Turrell Ganzfeld is to enter an apparently boundless illuminated arena without the focal points we typically use to situate the body in space. Moving forward in these uniform fields is disorienting — and, for some viewers, simply overwhelming. Turrell’s Ganzfelds, like his other light installations, offer no representational images or stories, although they are not abstract. “My work is very literal and in that sense very American,” he says. “It’s not about light — it is light.” In the last two decades, however, Turrell has often used allusive titles for his work, such as the reference to the Egyptian god Aten, and many of his Skyspaces

To enter a Turrell Ganzfeld is to enter an apparently boundless illuminated arena without the focal points we typically use to situate the body in space.

recognize that light filling a void can be a very powerful experience — a reminder that segregating the literal and what we call the ‘spiritual’ can sometimes be a meaningless distinction.” Turrell’s place in contemporary art history will probably remain unsettled until Roden Crater is open to the public, although the project has already established his mystique. Fundraising continues for a second series of installations within the volcano and Turrell’s supporters worldwide are hoping the triple-crown exhibitions will ultimately validate the title Richard Andrews invented for Turrell’s gallery exhibition in L.A., “Sooner than Later, Roden Crater.”

emulate ritual architecture such as stupas and pyramids. These allusions, together with his descriptions of Roden Crater as a site created to connect viewers with the movements of planets, stars, and distant galaxies, have heightened critics’ suspicions about Turrell’s sympathies with New Age cultures such as those famously headquartered in Sedona, Arizona, not far from Roden Crater. “I am interested in the dynamics of inner vision and religious traditions dealing with light, including the Quaker faith I grew up with,” he admits. “But I’m mostly interested in what I know. It’s not that I keep a lid on what I believe, but I want to have my believing kept very close to the knowing. I think most of us

As a private citizen, Jenny Holzer is a woman of few words. As a very public artist – and it is hard to imagine another contemporary American artist whose visual productions have been so publicly accessible – she is a woman of a million words. Words by Patricia Failing Photographs by Andrew Shapter

LETTERS GOVERNMENT TO THE

INVESTIGATING JENNY HOLZER

Jenny Holzer, I Feel You, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

ords, in fact, are the marrow of the 61-year-old Ohio-born artist’s large-scale, technology-driven productions. Thirty-six years after Holzer moved to New York City, and abruptly turned away from traditional painting to focus on the far more intricate substance of language, her loaded use of mottoes, phrases, verses, and quotations have appeared on T-shirts and posters, marble benches, and condom wrappers, have been light-projected onto the facades of government, corporate, and community buildings around the globe, and perhaps most memorably, have crawled and blinked across red-light LED screens. While Holzer has relied extensively on poetry and pronouncements from others, using heartening material on war and refugees as well as potent political jargon, perhaps some of her most career-defining aphoristic messages have been her own. In 1977 she began an ongoing series of Truisms (“Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity; Money creates taste; Don’t run people’s lives for them; Romantic love was invented to manipulate women”) that cogently pared down European and American enlightened thought, co-opted the tone and concision of authority, and disseminated through an endless supply of cultural channels–from baseball hats to billboards. Holzer simultaneously honors the value of language to communicate and critiques its ability to control and contain. But it is

something of a poetic about-face that an artist synonymous with the transparency of the word has spent the last few years not only returning to painting on canvas, but choosing redacted U.S. government documents as her subject. Her latest semi-abstract color-block paintings, reminiscent of those by modernists like Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt and Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, both conceal and broadcast various declassified military reports—papers that relate to everything from medical guidelines for detainees to the legality of interrogation methods—in a sense showing by painterly example how certain words are cut from the page so the audience doesn’t suffer the brutal truth in favor of the prettier surface. These days, Holzer spends most of her time traveling from project to exhibition and working on her paintings in her Brooklyn studio and at home in rural Hoosick Falls, New York. Holzer didn’t set out to be a conceptual artist who uses text, but rather an abstract painter. “I wanted to be soft like Rothko and ruthless like Ad Reinhardt.” So you were inspired by men not women? “There was a real paucity of role models. When I was a kid, the only artist I knew about was Picasso courtesy of Life magazine. And, as a little female kid in Ohio, it was hard to identify with Picasso: his life with his babes and my life with my cat were rather different.” Holzer gave up her dream of emulating Rothko and Reinhardt in 1976 when, after a liberal arts education followed by art

“I used language because I wanted to offer content that people — not necessarily art people — could understand.”

Jenny Holzer, Shanghai, 2004 Courtesy of Sotheby's of London

“I WANTED TO BE SOFT LIKE ROTHKO

Andreas Gursky, Kuwait Stock Exchange, 2000 Courtesy of Sotheby's of London

AND RUTHLESS LIKE AD REINHARDT.â&#x20AC;?

Jenny Holzer, Versailles, 2004 Courtesy of Sotheby's of London

Jenny Holzer, Redacted Documents, 2008 Courtesy of Sotheby's of London

“I wanted to show time and care. I wanted it to be an indicator of sincerity and attention. I wanted it to be human.”

Holzer's latest semi-abstract color-block paintings, reminiscent of those by modernists like Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt and Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, both conceal and broadcast various declassified military reports—papers that relate to everything from medical guidelines for detainees to the legality of interrogation methods — in a sense showing by painterly example how certain words are cut from the page so the audience doesn’t suffer the brutal truth in favor of the prettier surface.

such words as “Exploit” and “Isolate”. She laughs: “They really did say shock and awe!” In 2010, she started hand-painting copies of some of these documents – why the return to painting after a three-decade layoff? “I wanted to show time and care. I wanted it to be an indicator of sincerity and attention. I wanted it to be human.” Does the work reflect your own political views? “Don’t be a psycho killer – that has to be a goal, right?” she says, laughing again. “Having torture seemingly normalized is, I don’t think, a positive thing. Not enough people have stated that.” But, crucially, Holzer doesn’t overtly state that: she leaves us to arrive at that belief through looking at her work. “I think the material speaks for itself,” she says. “There’s no reason for me to give my pathetic opinion.”

school, she took part in a study program at the Whitney Museum in New York. Holzer’s tutor Ron Clark smothered her and her fellow students in texts. “He gave us a wonderful yet absolutely daunting reading list that, happily, I reacted against. I reduced all the reading to one-liners.” Her version of the list, turned into a work called Truisms, features such nuggets as: “A lot of professionals are crackpots.” Any suggestion that Holzer has softened politically is confounded by her work since 2004, much of it featured in Endgame. Catalyzed by her loathing for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, she studied redacted, declassified documents from the US’s National Security Archive and made silkscreen paintings of the most striking. They include maps used to plan the invasion of Iraq; these look like parodies of US foreign policy but, disturbingly, are the real thing. Big arrows are marked with

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REVIEWS

Richard Mosse, Congolese Soldier Courtesy of the Artist

Richard Mosse's HYPERCOLOR CONGO How do you get people to pay attention to the Congo? Artist Richard Mosse uses psychedelic photographs of rebels and warlords to make your head snap. He talks to Amelia-Hemphill about why some find his work offensive and representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale.

Richard Mosse’s photographs capture the darkness of war in vivid color: warlords and rebels armed with AK-47s are tinted with bubble gum and magenta pinks. Stripped skulls lie in the blood-red grass of rolling hills and the haunting stares of huddled women are framed with dusky purples. It’s an uncomfortable yet magnetic paradox, which resonates through Mosse’s work. Quite literally, he’s depicting the conflict in Africa’s Democratic Republic of the Congo in a whole new light. The secret behind the surreal color palette is Mosse’s use of the discontinued Kodak film, Aerochrome. Developed by militar y sur veillance during the Cold

War to detect enemy camouflage, the film registers the invisible spectrum of infrared light, tingeing portraits and landscapes with psychedelic hues of pink, red, and lilac. The International Rescue Committee estimates that 5.4 million people have been killed or have died of war-related causes in the conflict in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo since it first began in 1996. Though the war officially ended in 2002, fighting is still rife, especially within the mineral-rich eastern region. Rape, looting, and massacres are frequent tactics of intimidation among the different factions. UNICEF reported that, to date, 20 percent of the country’s children

Richard Mosse, The Enclave, 2013, Courtesy of the Artist

still die before the age of 5 and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped. “The cancer of conflict is getting more and more problematic. It’s really very convoluted, very incomprehensible,” says Mosse, who has made six journeys to the region, each for about two months. “I think this whole project is about dreams underwritten by nightmares,” said Mosse, recalling a harrowing scene he had encountered driving up to a small Congolese town named Masisi. It was bad weather and the roads were almost impassable, but upon arriving at the camp he and his translator were met by crowds of people, standing in silence. They had walked for two hours from their village, carrying the bodies of six massacre victims to show to the town’s governor. “It’s easier to talk about yourself through other people’s problems,” he said. “I’ve tried to make work in Ireland and it’s impossible. It’s too close to the heart.” Richard Mosse, Congo 2013. Courtesy of the Artist

REVIEWS

DOUG AITKEN: STATION TO STATION Four years ago multimedia artist Doug Aitken began thinking about the experience of viewing art, and watching movies, and listening to music, and how it all seemed the same: confined within the walls of a museum, gallery, concert venue, or movie theater. “Things created within art or music or film or architecture, they’re often restrained by the system that surrounds them,” Aitken says.

Aitken’s train is a “liquid art platform,” a constantly moving and evolving venue with no parameters for experiencing art.

Doug Aitken, Station to Station, 2013 Photographs by Ye Rin Mok

So he came up with Station to Station: A Nomadic Happening. It’s what he calls a “liquid art platform,” a constantly moving and evolving venue with no set parameters for experiencing the art. It sounds abstract, but, put simply, it’s art on wheels. Filled with artists, musicians, chefs, and seemingly everyone in between, the circus of players will collaborate on site-specific performances at each of the nine stops along the way. The shows will take place at the train stations and other locations, and a few will even happen on the train. Other times, Aitken says, they’ll stop spontaneously and perform for anyone who might just happen to be present. Berlin-based installation artist Olafur Eliasson has conceived a “drawing machine” that will harness the train’s kinetic energy to create images by the end of the cross-country journey. Sitting in Minneapolis at the moment, awaiting final touches, the train evokes a hybrid of a 19 th -century steam-engine train and a futuristic hyperloop‑like vessel. Inside, artists and crew will also record music, conversations, and performances, and, in an editing car, cut footage for Station to Station’s website. “Can we make something that’s greater than a moment in time,” Aitken wonders, “that can be valuable 10 years from now, that someone can reach back to and find this encounter of a person, at this moment in time, expressing themselves verbally or discovering something new?” The only way to find out is to ride the ride and see where it takes us.

David Hockney, Untitled, 2012. Image courtesy of Sotheby's of London.

ART GUIDE

DAVID HOCKNEY: A BIGGER EXHIBITION October 26, 2013–January 20, 2014 De Young Museum, San Francisco

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition (October 26, 2013-January 20, 2014) marks the return of the celebrated British artist to California with an exhibition assembled exclusively for the de Young. Expansive in scope and monumental in scale, this show is the first comprehensive survey of his 21st-century work and represents one of the most prolific decades of his career. Renowned for his use of traditional media as well as evolving technologies, Hockney has selected monumental paintings, Photoshop portraits, digital films that track the changing seasons, vivid landscapes created using the iPad, as well as never-before-exhibited charcoal drawings and paintings completed in 2013. Large-scale, multi-canvas oil paintings and digital movies shot with multiple cameras, some requiring as many as 18 monitors for their display, portray Hockney’s beloved England. His unique perspectives of California, Iceland, and Norway are also presented, including iPad drawings of Yosemite. The portraits, central to Hockney’s practice since his youth, depict friends, colleagues, and family members, and provide a glimpse of the artist’s personal and intimate relationships with his sitters. This first comprehensive showing of Hockney’s diverse output since 2002 includes a new series documenting the arrival of spring in 2013 and reveals the artist at the peak of his creative powers.

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS: THE PRODUCTION LINE OF HAPPINESS August 2–November 2, 2014 MoMA, Los Angeles

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness, a major survey of one of the most influential artists working in the photographic medium, confirms Christopher Williams’s (American, b. 1956) status as one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking artists of his generation, one whose interests in his generational elders is mirrored by the impact he is currently having on younger artists. In a career spanning over 30 years, Williams has explored the realms of photojournalism, picture archives, mass media, and commercial imaging, producing a concise oeuvre of photographs that carries an outsized impact on artists and cultural historians today. Deeply invested in the history of photography as a medium of art and intellectual inquiry, he is committed to furthering a critique of late capitalist society, in which images typically function as agents of consumer spectacle. Williams is currently professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Christopher Williams, Camera, 2009. Image courtesy of MoMA, Los Angeles..

Above: Xu—Zhen , Untitled, 2013. Below: Wang Jianwei, Flower Child, 2013. Courtesy of Hayward Gallery, London.

ART OF CHANGE: NEW DIRECTIONS FROM CHINA September 7 – December 9, 2013 Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London

This is the first major exhibition to focus solely on contemporary installation and performance art from China. It presents extraordinary live art and large-scale installations by some of China’s most innovative artists, in works dating from the 1980s to the present day. Art of Change traces each artist’s development, showing important early works alongside recent creations and new commissions. Change, and the acceptance that everything is subject to change, is deeply rooted in Eastern philosophy. The exhibition features works that deal with transformation, instability and impermanence, looking at how these themes are conveyed through action or materials. Artists in the exhibition include Chen Zhen, Yingmei Duan, Gu Dexin, Liang Shaoji, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Wang Jianwei, Xu Zhen and MadeIn Company. The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery.

ART GUIDE

Jurriaan Schrofer, Type/Dynamics, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.

TYPE/DYNAMICS: JURRIAAN SCHROFER November 8, 2013 - March 4, 2014 Stedelijk Museum, Oslo.

This exhibition is inspired by the publication of the doctoral thesis by Frederike Huygen on the graphic designer, photo-book pioneer, art director, teacher, arts administrator, and environmental artist Jurriaan Schrofer. The Stedelijk Museum invited LUST, a multidisciplinary graphic design practice based in The Hague, to take part in the exhibition because of their expertise in presenting graphic design presentations with nontraditional media. LUST was asked to use cutting-edge media to create an installation that plays off, reacts to, and dialogues with Schrofer’s work.

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN: IT AIN’T CHEAP Saturday, January 12, 2013 - Sunday, April 27, 2014 Dia: Beacon, Beacon, New York

Presenting six of the artist’s rarely exhibited metal paintings from 1965, as well as a sculpture titled It Ain’t Cheap from the same year, will be on view from January 12, 2013 – April 27, 2014. These works are from a series of 12-inch-square paintings that were presented at Leo Castelli Gallery in January 1965 in a solo exhibition titled Paintings done in auto lacquer and metal flake on formica. Dia presented an exhibition of work by John Chamberlain at The Dan Flavin Art Institute in 2007. John Chamberlain, It Ain't Cheap, 2014. Image courtesy of the Joh Chamberlain Trust and the Dia Foundation.

Pipilotti Rist, Mercy Garden Retour Skin, 2014. Image courtesy of the Northern Gallery, Glasgow.Jim Lambie, Ten Liquid Incidents, 2014. Image courtesy of the Northern Gallery, Glasgow.

19TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY – YOU IMAGINE WHAT YOU DESIRE March - June 2014 SydTenney, Australia

viewers will be able to immerse themselves in a sensual pleasure world created from vivid colour and light. In the double-height gallery on Level 3, Horn will present Ten Liquid Incidents (2010–12), an installation of ten solid-cast glass sculptures which engages with ideas of materiality, mutability and perception. The meditative work draws on the artist’s ongoing investigation of the weather and landscape, in particular her personal relationship to Iceland. Bringing together a vibrant list of more than 90 artists from 31 countries the 19th Biennale of Sydney will be presented across five venues: MCA, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace, Carriageworks and Cockatoo Island.

MCA will once again host Asia Pacific’s largest contemporary visual arts event, when the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire opens on 21 March. Under the artistic direction of Juliana Engberg, the 19th Biennale celebrates the imagination as a spirited exploration of the world, seeking splendour and rapture in works that remain true to a greater, even sublime, visuality. Here at the MCA artworks will be presented across two floors, drawing on the elements of air and water, as well as the realms of the imaginative and the surreal. The Museum’s Level 1 galleries will feature new work by Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie and a site-specific video installation by renowned Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, commissioned especially for the MCA’s expansive Northern gallery. In Rist’s Mercy Garden Retour Skin (2014),