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Robert Rauschenberg’s Radical Project to Bring Together Artists and Engineers Gets the Getty Spotlight

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One fall evening in 1966, an audience crowded the 69th Regiment Armory in New York for a curious art happening titled “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.”
Over the course of the night, a series of performances unfolded. Visitors watched Yvonne Rainer direct a group of participants via walkie-talkie to move large objects around a stage; they saw John Cage orchestrate a choir of telephones and radios; and they observed as Frank Stella played tennis with Mimi Kanarek using rackets wired with transmitters. They wound their way through a billowy maze Steve Paxton created with polyethylene sheets. More than 10,000 people attended the 10-day run; critics savaged it.
Audience members walk through Steve Paxton’s Physical Things at “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering” at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, 1966. Photo: Robert R. McElroy / Getty Images.
The event was staged by 10 artists in collaboration with 30 engineers from Bell Labs, intended to showcase the possibilities of marrying their skills. As planning committee member Simone Forti reflected, it was less an art presentation than “a step towards the creation of a situation that will later be important to the making of art.” It’s a prescient observation, as “9 Evenings” would come to serve as a proof-of-concept for the initiative behind it, one that sought to inject technology into art-making.
John Cage sets up telephones for Variations VII at “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering” at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, 1966. Photo: Robert R. McElroy / Getty Images.
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was in nascent form when “9 Evenings” took place—a cross-disciplinary concept sketched out by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman in collaboration with Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer. Its New York debut spurred its cementing into an organization with the goal of helping artists “achiev[e] new art through new technology,” as Rauschenberg and Klüver wrote in the first E.A.T. newsletter. The group was soon inundated with dozens upon dozens of requests from creatives eager to expand their practices.
“E.A.T. was a phenomenon,” curator Nancy Perloff told me. “Unlike today, it was a resource with a capital R that would allow artists to experiment.”
Lucy Jackson Young and Niels O. Young, Fakir in 3⁄4 Time (1968). Photo: Shunk-Kender. Art courtesy Thomas Young. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
Perloff is one of the masterminds behind “Sensing the Future,” an exhibition at Los Angeles’ Getty Research Institute that revisits E.A.T.’s brief yet meaningful existence. The show, part of PST Art, unfolds across two galleries, with artifacts surfaced from the institute’s archives.
The organization’s early days fill the first room. Detailed here are its founding members’ early art-tech experiments (Rauschenberg’s Dry Cell, for example), as well as E.A.T.’s 1967 collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art on an open call for artworks created with technology (nine works from which were included in the 1968 show, “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age“).
“9 Evenings,” of course, takes up the bulk of the space, its happenings presented in the form of archival photos, videos, and documents. Just as intriguing are the letters that E.A.T. received after the event; blown up and arrayed on a wall, they were sent in by the likes of Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Marta Minujín, and David Hinton, all seeking to work with the group. Hesse, for one, was super keen on “chemistry.”
A letter from Hans Haacke, on view at “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” at the Getty Research Institute. Photo: Min Chen.
“They are a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s in the archive,” said Perloff of these submissions to E.A.T.’s Technical Services division. “The archive has these punch cards, where artists would put down the materials they wanted, and the engineer would then look at that and respond. The requests came from visual artists, composers, poets—E.A.T. was very cross-disciplinary, all the time.”
That was most evident in E.A.T.’s pièce de résistance: its design for the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Japan World Exposition. The project called on the expertise of 75 artists, architects, and engineers, not counting the labor of American and Japanese construction companies.
Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970. Photo: Shunk-Kender. Floats © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris. Fog © Fujiko Nakaya. Courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology. Light Towers © Forrest Myers. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
Once unveiled, the pavilion took the shape of a geodesic dome. To reach it, visitors navigated a cloud of fog sculpted by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya before encountering kinetic dome-shaped robots designed by sculptor Robert Breer and engineer John Ryde.
The pavilion’s interior was far more dramatic: its spherical ceiling was an aluminized mylar mirror, a mammoth 90 feet in diameter, that produced inverted reflections, further animated by lights and sounds coming from electronics installed under the floor. Attendees were also equipped with handheld receiving devices allowing them pick up different audio transmissions as they roamed the dome—the sound of breaking glass in one spot, birdsong in another. Live performances, programmed by artist Tony Martin and choreographer Remy Charlip, further activated the space. The effect was boiled down in the project’s subtitle: World Without Boundary.
Interior of the Mirror Dome at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970. Photo: © Fujiko Nakaya. Courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
“The Pepsi Pavilion,” Perloff reflected in the show’s accompanying publication, “is emblematic and indeed a capstone of the collaboration between artists and engineers that defined [E.A.T.].”
The sheer effort that went into E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavilion occupies the second gallery of the exhibition. Photographs, videos, and other artifacts variously spotlight the dome’s architectural design and elaborate sound system. A reproduction of a console allows visitors to recreate the pavilion’s sound-modifying aspects.
The project, alas, cost so much to operate and was so experimental in form that its corporate sponsor, Pepsi-Cola, pulled the plug after a month. E.A.T. was forced to abandon the pavilion.
Installation view of “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” at the Getty Research Institute. Photo: Min Chen.
But of course, it wouldn’t be the last time artists and engineers attempted such a spectacle. Today’s glut of immersive shows similarly engineer multi-sensory environments (with presumably less overhead), while the fields of art and technology are far from strangers to each other. And the once-radical proposals by E.A.T., which scaled back operations around 1975, don’t seem so unfeasible today.
Consider sound pioneer and E.A.T. member David Tudor’s Island Eye Island Ear (1970), documentation of which caps the exhibition. The environmental work proposed to transform the Swedish island of Knavelskär into an art installation with sound and reflectors, with fog by Nakaya and kites by Jackie Matisse. “It was going to be a kind of concert on the island,” Perloff explained. “They never got it off the ground.”
But they have now. The piece was most recently realized on the Norwegian island of Svinøya, as part of the 2024 Lofoten International Art Festival, following a stop on Kamome Island in Hokkaido. It’ll likely continue to be reimagined into the future.
“Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” is on view at the Getty Research Institute, 1200 Getty Center Dr #1100, Los Angeles, California, through February 23, 2025. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Robert Rauschenberg’s Radical Project to Bring Together Artists and Engineers Gets the Getty Spotlight

    One fall evening in 1966, an audience crowded the 69th Regiment Armory in New York for a curious art happening titled “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.”
    Over the course of the night, a series of performances unfolded. Visitors watched Yvonne Rainer direct a group of participants via walkie-talkie to move large objects around a stage; they saw John Cage orchestrate a choir of telephones and radios; and they observed as Frank Stella played tennis with Mimi Kanarek using rackets wired with transmitters. They wound their way through a billowy maze Steve Paxton created with polyethylene sheets. More than 10,000 people attended the 10-day run; critics savaged it.
    Audience members walk through Steve Paxton’s Physical Things at “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering” at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, 1966. Photo: Robert R. McElroy / Getty Images.
    The event was staged by 10 artists in collaboration with 30 engineers from Bell Labs, intended to showcase the possibilities of marrying their skills. As planning committee member Simone Forti reflected, it was less an art presentation than “a step towards the creation of a situation that will later be important to the making of art.” It’s a prescient observation, as “9 Evenings” would come to serve as a proof-of-concept for the initiative behind it, one that sought to inject technology into art-making.
    John Cage sets up telephones for Variations VII at “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering” at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, 1966. Photo: Robert R. McElroy / Getty Images.
    Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was in nascent form when “9 Evenings” took place—a cross-disciplinary concept sketched out by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman in collaboration with Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer. Its New York debut spurred its cementing into an organization with the goal of helping artists “achiev[e] new art through new technology,” as Rauschenberg and Klüver wrote in the first E.A.T. newsletter. The group was soon inundated with dozens upon dozens of requests from creatives eager to expand their practices.
    “E.A.T. was a phenomenon,” curator Nancy Perloff told me. “Unlike today, it was a resource with a capital R that would allow artists to experiment.”
    Lucy Jackson Young and Niels O. Young, Fakir in 3⁄4 Time (1968). Photo: Shunk-Kender. Art courtesy Thomas Young. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
    Perloff is one of the masterminds behind “Sensing the Future,” an exhibition at Los Angeles’ Getty Research Institute that revisits E.A.T.’s brief yet meaningful existence. The show, part of PST Art, unfolds across two galleries, with artifacts surfaced from the institute’s archives.
    The organization’s early days fill the first room. Detailed here are its founding members’ early art-tech experiments (Rauschenberg’s Dry Cell, for example), as well as E.A.T.’s 1967 collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art on an open call for artworks created with technology (nine works from which were included in the 1968 show, “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age“).
    “9 Evenings,” of course, takes up the bulk of the space, its happenings presented in the form of archival photos, videos, and documents. Just as intriguing are the letters that E.A.T. received after the event; blown up and arrayed on a wall, they were sent in by the likes of Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Marta Minujín, and David Hinton, all seeking to work with the group. Hesse, for one, was super keen on “chemistry.”
    A letter from Hans Haacke, on view at “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” at the Getty Research Institute. Photo: Min Chen.
    “They are a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s in the archive,” said Perloff of these submissions to E.A.T.’s Technical Services division. “The archive has these punch cards, where artists would put down the materials they wanted, and the engineer would then look at that and respond. The requests came from visual artists, composers, poets—E.A.T. was very cross-disciplinary, all the time.”
    That was most evident in E.A.T.’s pièce de résistance: its design for the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Japan World Exposition. The project called on the expertise of 75 artists, architects, and engineers, not counting the labor of American and Japanese construction companies.
    Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970. Photo: Shunk-Kender. Floats © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris. Fog © Fujiko Nakaya. Courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology. Light Towers © Forrest Myers. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
    Once unveiled, the pavilion took the shape of a geodesic dome. To reach it, visitors navigated a cloud of fog sculpted by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya before encountering kinetic dome-shaped robots designed by sculptor Robert Breer and engineer John Ryde.
    The pavilion’s interior was far more dramatic: its spherical ceiling was an aluminized mylar mirror, a mammoth 90 feet in diameter, that produced inverted reflections, further animated by lights and sounds coming from electronics installed under the floor. Attendees were also equipped with handheld receiving devices allowing them pick up different audio transmissions as they roamed the dome—the sound of breaking glass in one spot, birdsong in another. Live performances, programmed by artist Tony Martin and choreographer Remy Charlip, further activated the space. The effect was boiled down in the project’s subtitle: World Without Boundary.
    Interior of the Mirror Dome at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970. Photo: © Fujiko Nakaya. Courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
    “The Pepsi Pavilion,” Perloff reflected in the show’s accompanying publication, “is emblematic and indeed a capstone of the collaboration between artists and engineers that defined [E.A.T.].”
    The sheer effort that went into E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavilion occupies the second gallery of the exhibition. Photographs, videos, and other artifacts variously spotlight the dome’s architectural design and elaborate sound system. A reproduction of a console allows visitors to recreate the pavilion’s sound-modifying aspects.
    The project, alas, cost so much to operate and was so experimental in form that its corporate sponsor, Pepsi-Cola, pulled the plug after a month. E.A.T. was forced to abandon the pavilion.
    Installation view of “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” at the Getty Research Institute. Photo: Min Chen.
    But of course, it wouldn’t be the last time artists and engineers attempted such a spectacle. Today’s glut of immersive shows similarly engineer multi-sensory environments (with presumably less overhead), while the fields of art and technology are far from strangers to each other. And the once-radical proposals by E.A.T., which scaled back operations around 1975, don’t seem so unfeasible today.
    Consider sound pioneer and E.A.T. member David Tudor’s Island Eye Island Ear (1970), documentation of which caps the exhibition. The environmental work proposed to transform the Swedish island of Knavelskär into an art installation with sound and reflectors, with fog by Nakaya and kites by Jackie Matisse. “It was going to be a kind of concert on the island,” Perloff explained. “They never got it off the ground.”
    But they have now. The piece was most recently realized on the Norwegian island of Svinøya, as part of the 2024 Lofoten International Art Festival, following a stop on Kamome Island in Hokkaido. It’ll likely continue to be reimagined into the future.
    “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” is on view at the Getty Research Institute, 1200 Getty Center Dr #1100, Los Angeles, California, through February 23, 2025. More

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    Friends, Lovers, Partners: An Exhibition Exploring Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp’s Unbreakable Bond

    A show celebrating the Dada pioneers Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp at Brussels’ Bozar, brings together artworks, design objects, and written documents from the couple whose professional relationship deeply informed their private life, and vice versa.
    E. Linck, Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp in front of puppets (1918) © SABAM Belgium 2024.
    Hans Arp was a German-French artist born in 1886 in Alsace-Lorraine, an area historically contested between France and Germany. He adopted the name Jean after Alsace became French territory in the 1910s, but continued to call himself Hans when speaking German.
    Hans/Jean Arp, Head with Annoying Objects (1933) © SABAM Belgium 2024.
    After studying art in both countries Arp settled in neutral Switzerland after faking mental illness, to avoid the German draft. It was at an exhibition in Zurich in November 1915 that he experienced what he termed “the greatest event of my life”: meeting Sophie Taeuber.
    Hans/Jean Arp, Composition (c. 1929) © SABAM Belgium 2024, photo: Mick Vincenz.
    Taeuber was born in Switzerland in 1889, studying at German art schools before returning to her home country during the First World War. The pair married a month shy of seven years after their first meeting. Arp and Taeuber-Arp are now considered two of abstract art’s most important artists, after a period of re-evaluation saw the latter historically overshadowed by her husband. The show at Bozar brings their work together, presenting the artists not only as equals but as vital to each other’s practice.
    Hans/Jean Arp with the navel monocle (1926) © SABAM Belgium 2024.
    Walburga Krupp, the curator of “Friends, Lovers, Partners” has spoken of the couple’s symbiotic way of working: “Not only did each of them have an independent oeuvre, they also explicitly made duo-works, jointly exe­cuted, in which each of their individual styles could no longer be recognized […] Their working side by side as equals in their studio and in constant exchange reveals the similarities and differences between her geometric abstractions and his organic ones.”
    Hans/Jean Arp, Man and Woman (c. 1928) © SABAM Belgium 2024, photo: Fabien de Cugnac.
    The pair blurred the lines between fine and applied art. Taeuber-Arp created textiles and jewelry in addition to her paintings and sculptures for which she is better known, and Arp producing a large body of written work. The couple are particularly regarded for their contributions to the Dada movement which blossomed in Switzerland and Germany in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Taeuber-Arp’s Dada Head (1920) is one of the movement’s most iconic artworks.
    Nic Aluf, Sophie Taeuber with the Dada Head (1920) © SABAM Belgium 2024.
    More than 250 artworks are on display in “Friends, Lovers, Partners” including 230 paintings and 70 photographs, in addition to drawings, archival documents, sculptures, textile works, and jewelry. The show is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by Bozar Books and Mercatorfonds which also includes diary and letter extracts from the couple and poetry by Arp, including his devastating verses written after Taeuber-Arp’s tragic death at 53.
    Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tapestry (1924) © Photo: Roberto Pellegrini, Bellinzona.
    Hans/Jean Arp & Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Friends, Lovers, Partners is on display at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts until January 19 2025, then at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter just outside of Oslo from February 20 to May 11 2025. More

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    Tove Jansson’s Beloved Moomins Turn 80 With a Major Exhibition in Helsinki

    A monumental exhibition celebrating the artist and author Tove Jansson opens at Helsinki Art Museum on October 25 as part of a series of events held around the country, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Moomins.
    Jansson (born in 1914 and part of a minority of Swedish-speaking Finns) wrote the first of her Moomin novels, “The Moomins and The Great Flood”, in 1945, with a further eight books (plus five picture books) released over the following 48 years. The characters are beloved by children and adults around the globe.
    So popular are the Moomins in Jansson’s native Finland that in 1993, the year of her final Moomin picture book ‘Songs from the Moominvalley”, a Moomin-inspired theme park was opened in Kailo, designed after Jansson’s drawings. The author’s birthday, August 9, is also celebrated across the country, as Finnish Art Day.
    Tove Jansson in her studio © Eva Konikoff.
    According to legend, the inspiration for the series of characters came from a warning Jansson received from her uncle as a child. He said that a “Moomintroll” lived in his kitchen and would punish her if she stole food. The design for the white, almost hippopotamus-like beings, were apparently born out of an unkind caricature Jansson drew of the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
    Although her legacy is certainly dominated by the popularity of the Moomins, Jansson had her own successful art practice separate from her work as a children’s book illustrator and author. Having studied art in both Stockholm and Paris, Jansson mounted seven solo shows in Finland during her lifetime and was commissioned to create major murals across the country. She also illustrated the books of other authors including J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and Lewis Caroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland“.
    Tove Jansson, Bird Blue (1953) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.
    Jansson’s life, particularly her lifelong partnership with the artist Tuulikki Pietilä (which began more than a decade before the decriminalization of homosexuality in Finland) was the focus of a 2020 biopic. “Tove” was directed by Zaida Begroth and starred Alma Pöysti.
    The new exhibition “Tove Jansson: Paradise” celebrates Jansson’s illustrious career with a focus on the murals she created during the 1940s and 1950s. These were mostly made in Helsinki, where Jansson was born and spent the vast majority of her life. Sites included the City Hall restaurant, a children’s hospital, a local electromechanical factory, and a girls’ school.
    Tove Jansson, sketch for Bird Blue (1953) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Kirsi Halkola.
    “Tove Jansson’s created her public works during Finland’s postwar reconstruction period, aiming to spread hope and joy” Arja Miller, the Museum Director of Helsinki Art Museum told Artnet News. “[This show] celebrates her remarkable range as an artist, while emphasizing her desire to bring hope and delight to everyday life. In today’s ever-changing, often uncertain world, her work feels more relevant than ever—reminding us of the power of art to inspire, uplift, and create a sense of connection.”
    Tove Jansson, Party in the City (1947) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Hanna Kukorelli.
    More than 180 objects and artworks relating to Jansson’s public art projects are on display, taking up over 4,200 square feet across two floors of Helsinki Art Museum. HAM will also be celebrating the 10th anniversary since its reopening in 2015 following major renovations. Jansson’s murals Party in the Countryside and Party in the City (both created in 1947) are part of HAM’s permanent collection.
    Tove Jansson, Niilo Suihko and Party in the City © Per Olov Jansson.
    Also included are six life-size charcoal mural sketches, which have never been displayed publicly before. In fact, many were unrolled for the first time since their creation for their inclusion in this show. In addition to preparatory paintings and sketches, there are photographs, works on glass, videos and book covers. One such cover will be for Jansson’s popular 1972 novel “The Summer Book”. A film adaption starring Glenn Close premiers this month at London’s BFI Film Festival.
    Tove Jansson, Party in the Countryside (1947) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Hanna Kukorelli.
    Jansson’s debut solo show was held at the Bäcksbacka’s Konstsalongen gallery in 1943, and paintings loaned from the collection of the Bäcksbacka family will be on display in the exhibition. Visitors to HAM will also be given a sneak-preview of a new documentary following Jansson’s creation of her only altarpiece, which she made for Teuva Church in South Ostrobothnia in 1953.
    Unrolling of Tove Jansson’s preparatory charcoal studies at HAM: sketch for Bird Blue (1953) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.
    James Zambra, a relative of Jansson and the Creative Director at Moomin Characters Ltd. told Artnet News that the show is a “a deeply personal and meaningful celebration of Tove’s legacy” and that there’s “no better way to kick off celebrating 80 years since the debut of her first story in the Moomin series.” “Tove Jansson: Paradise” is on view at HAM from October 25 to April 6 2025. More

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    The 2024 Busan Biennale Is Eccentric, Vexing, and Full of Thrills

    A robotic arm moves a long, black whip across the floor, and then suddenly lets it rip. Nearby, a motor pulls a knife on a wire toward the ceiling. Without warning, the blade falls, puncturing a wooden table. Low stanchions separate you from these works, which are by, respectively, the Vietnamese artists Nguyễn Phương Linh and Trương Quế Chi, but they are still quite menacing.
    Partial installation view of Nguyễn Phương Linh & Trương Quế Chi’s Sourceless Waters: The Whip & The Knife (2024).
    Another room here at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea has a peculiar amount of empty white wall space. As you stare, your eyes tingle. Is it really empty? There are “three almost invisible hues of color,” a wall label explains. This is Carla Arocha’s Snow (2003/2024), which simulates snow blindness, a condition that “causes us to see dead cells as the blind spots in our eyesight.” We are “looking at our own death,” the label adds.
    On a grass field outside, there is an old trailer painted with larger-than-life flowers by Doowon Lee. The self-taught Korean artist has stuffed similarly exuberant canvases inside the vehicle, along with a bevy of potted plants, creating a verdant little refuge on MOCA Busan’s island home. Across the Nakdong River, apartment buildings stretch off into the distance.
    Doowon Lee’s The flower garden of BUDDHA-BEE in a caravan (2024).
    Welcome to the 2024 Busan Biennale, which is by turns harrowing and sedate, almost comically blunt and frustratingly hermetic. It is one of the more freewheeling exhibitions I have seen in recent years, and also one of the more enervating. On view through Sunday, it’s titled “Seeing in the Dark”—which is difficult to do, literally speaking, but it is precisely what great artists can accomplish by developing fresh ways of looking at the world and allowing us to make sense of, yes, very dark times.
    The biennial’s artistic directors—Vera Mey, an independent curator from New Zealand, and Philippe Pirotte, a former rector of the Städelschule in Frankfurt—have marshaled an admirably eclectic list of 62 individuals and groups for that task. There are big-league Korean names and a few regulars on the global art circuit, but most are not well known. This show is a bet on new talent.
    Kyung Hwa Kim’s Harmony (2024), made from cloth used to make hanbok, traditional Korean clothing.
    Violence is everywhere, even in unabashedly beautiful material. one hanging tapestry—hundreds of fabric flowers stitched together by the Korean artist Kyung Hwa Kim—is titled People massacred in the valley (2024). The plants are native to the site of a mass killing of leftists and alleged leftists in 1950s Korea. Kim’s work stuns, but other pieces feel overly fixated on history: Footnote Art that mines historical minutiae to no real end in wan installations and paintings, interesting enough but random.
    Activism is also everywhere, for better and for worse. Subversive Film, a Palestinian collective that took part in the fraught Documenta 15 in Kassel in 2022, is on hand with a compilation of film clips from anti-colonial and worker movements. Here, too, is the Indonesian group Taring Padi, which displayed a piece with anti-Semitic imagery in that show, igniting a firestorm. Its contributions in Busan include frenetic banners from peasant protests back home and a low wall (a barricade?) made of bags of rice. (Midway through my visit, I hear a man with a Germanic accent muttering to his companion, “Documenta redux, Documenta redux.”)
    “Glitch Barricade,” a solo show of protest photographer Seo Young-geol’s work that was staged as part of the biennale by Hong Jin-hwon.
    There are more nuanced and fruitful approaches. One the biennial’s highlights is a miniature solo show-within-the-show of Seo Young-geol’s photographs of tense pro-democracy demonstrations in South Korea in the 1980s and ‘90s. It was organized by the filmmaker Hong Jin-hown, who’s printed Seo’s images in a variety of sizes, pasting some to the wall and framing others, building a chaotic collage of people chanting, waving banners, crying. In a neighboring theater, Hong has a two-channel documentary, Double Slit (2024), that looks at how leaders of those protests became elected officials, abandoned radical aims, and formed a new establishment. Post-viewing, those heroic snapshots are tinged with melancholy.
    Yun Suknam, a pioneering feminist artist in Korea in her mid-80s, has a series of affecting portraits of women involved in the nation’s fight for independence from Japan in the early 20th century. No depictions remain of some of these figures, who worked in obscurity, so Yun drew on archival texts, using pencil and pigment to make the only ones that now exist. And in a chilling video by the Chinese artist Chen Xiaoyun, Night/2.4KM, the camera follows a group of young men—construction workers or farmers, perhaps—as they march through the night. They are carrying sticks and shovels, as if headed toward a brawl, but they never arrive. They just keep going. The piece is from 2009, but it feels awfully of the moment.
    A partial installation view Mugunghwa Pirates (2024), portraits of South Korean presidents as pirates by of Koo Hunjoo, who also works under the name Kay2. It’s on view at the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum.
    The biennial’s stated themes are doozies: “pirate enlightenment,” borrowing from anthropologist David Graeber’s eponymous 2023 book, which posits that communities formed by descendants of pirates in 18th-century Madagascar helped inspire the European Enlightenment, as well as Buddhist enlightenment. (These phenomena provide means of “seeing in the dark,” in a very expansive sense, you might argue.) Pirate and Buddhist iconography get big play here.
    Seven pirates smile from gold frames in the basement of the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum, one of the biennial’s three satellite locations. They’re the work of a Busan street artist named aka Koo Hunjoo, a.k.a. Kay2, who has literalized Graeber’s thesis by taking spray paint to official-looking portraits of South Korea’s democratically elected presidents, détourning the besuited politicians with black hats, scrappy beards, and missing teeth. It’s goofy, but it does have a certain piquancy following the uproar caused by a high school student’s amusing caricature of the current president (as Thomas the Tank Engine, controlled by his wife).
    Eugene Jung’s W💀W (Waves of Wreckage), 2024.
    Back at the museum, the young gun Eugene Jung, who works in Seoul and New York, ripped open walls to a gallery where she scattered about all sorts of construction materials (plywood, steel pipes). The 2024 work, W💀W (Waves of Wreckage), “resembles a temporarily wrecked pirate ship,” a wall label claims, and while I can’t quite see that, I am impressed by the raw energy, the mayhem, of the effort—a reasonable response to life right now. On the roof of an abandoned house in the heart of this city of 3.5 million, Jung placed rugged, charred sculptures that could be fragments of an enormous sphere that has been cracked open in some unnamed disaster. (It vaguely recalls Fritz Koenig’s 1968–71 Sphere, which was smashed on 9/11.)
    In some of the most potent work in the biennial, artists invent new languages or create private worlds. There’s the Jamaican American Douglas R. Ewart, who makes charismatic instruments out of things like crutches and cake pans, paying tribute to people like Sun Ra and George Floyd; Doowon Lee, with his joyful garden paintings; and the Togolese-Belgian photographer Hélène Amouzou, who toys with camera techniques to make unforgettable black-and-white self-portraits where she has a furtive presence, there and not there, only giving her viewers so much.
    Daejin Choi, And, nothing was said, 2024.
    The work that has really stuck with me, though, is one of the most traditional. It’s a massive ink drawing on paper, à la Raymond Pettibon, by the Korean artist Daejin Choi, and it shows about a dozen elite South Korean commandos in a raft (the kind of subject that rarely appears in exhibitions of vanguard-minded contemporary art). These soldiers are wearing wetsuits and goggles, training, perhaps prepping for some clandestine strike. You might think of it as a companion piece to Arocha’s nearly invisible Snow.
    Death hovers in the air here, too, but with cold clarity. Choi has rendered these men with loose brushstrokes, and it almost looks like they could evanesce into a pool of ink at any moment. For now, though, we can see them clearly.
    See more images of the Busan Biennale below.
    Carla Arocha’s Snow (2003/2024), a wall painted with almost invisible color.
    Partial installation view of Shooshie Sulaiman and I Wayan Darmadi’s PETA – One cloud, nine drops of rain (2024) at Choryang House.
    Installation view of Nika Dubrovsky’s three-channel video work Fight Club (2022) at the Hansung1918 venue.
    Cheikh Ndiaye’s Le Paris (2024) at the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum.
    Absolutely wild photographs by Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé at the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum.
    At left, Joe Namy’s Dub Plants (2024); at right, Omar Chowdhury’s short film BAN♡ITS (2024).
    A (nearly) empty room containing a sound work by Daejin Choi, Kim ChooJa Medley No. 2 (2024).
    [embedded content]Daejin Choi’s Kim ChooJa Medley No. 2 (2024) slows down an album by that popular singer of the 1970s and ’80s so that it lasts 24 hours.
    Single-print etchings on paper by Fred Bervoets from 1997. Each is titled Mijn Stad (“My City”).
    Partial view of Ishikawa Mao’s The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll part 10 (2023), which takes up moments in Okinawan history.
    Paintings by Doowon Lee.
    Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson’s Kimchi-Waakye (2024).
    Ghostly self-portraits by Hélène Amouzou, highlights of the Busan Biennale.
    Two paintings by Bang Jeong A, Those Enlightened in the Water, which shows a Buddhist Arhat (a saint), and Growing Claws-Becoming, both from 2024.
    Golrokh Nafisi with Ahmadali Kadivar, Continuous cities, 2024.
    John Vea’s Section 69ZD Employment Relations Act 2000 (2019) (2024), a break room-as-installation that can be used by visitors during set break times: 15 minutes at 10 a.m., 30 minutes at noon, and 15 minutes at 3 p.m.
    Installation view of the 2024 Busan Biennale, with Nathalie Muchamad’s ENRIQUE (2024) at left.
    Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s short video piece It Is Not a Place (2024).
    Song Cheon, Avalokiteshvara and Mary-The Truth Has Never Left My Side, 2024.
    Works from Yun Suknam’s “Women of Resistance Series” (2020–23), which depict women who fought for Korea’s independence from Japan.
    Untitled works by Kanitha Tith from between 2000 and 2024 at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art.
    Taring Padi’s Memedi Sawah/Scarecrow Installation (2024).
    Inside Doowon Lee’s The flower garden of BUDDHA-BEE in a caravan (2024). More

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    in Street Art

    Snik – Still Life – Manchester UK

    SNIK have made a strong return to Manchester’s Northern Quarter, unveiling a new 20-meter mural that promises to become yet another iconic landmark in the city. The artists, whose work last appeared in Manchester in 2018, have made a big move with their latest work, entitled Still Life. The mural aims to create a little oasis of calm in the busy city.Still Life blends seamlessly into the area’s creative heritage, while also offering a reminder to appreciate the beauty and tranquility that can be found in our surroundings. SNIK explain; “With Still Life, we wanted to create something that not only enhances the urban landscape but also encourages people to take a step back and appreciate the little things, the moments of calm that we often overlook.”Still Life is an ode to Manchester’s love for street art and serves as a reminder of the city’s dynamic and ever-evolving cultural scene. This new work is set to become a cherished part of Manchester’s artistic heritage, much like its predecessor, Serenity, which remains a solid fixture in the city.Snikstagram More

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    in Exhibitions

    Jean-Michel Basquiat Meets a Roman Venus at Gagosian Paris

    In a rare meeting between the classical and the contemporary, Gagosian’s Paris gallery has staged a show pairing an ancient Roman sculpture with work by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sculpture of the goddess Venus juxtaposed with Basquiat’s 1982 painting offers viewers a new lens through which to view the late artist’s still-resonant oeuvre.
    The painting, Untitled, which itself features the outline of a classical Venus statue, is part of a series Basquiat painted at the age of 21 while staying in Modena in northern Italy. He had been invited there by the dealer Emilio Mazzoli to produce an exhibition but, after the pair fell out, the eight works were eventually sold by the artist’s New York gallerist Annina Nosei. They were only seen together for the first time last year, at a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, Switzerland.
    Asked about his experience in Modena years later, Basquiat likened it to “a sick factory. I hated it. I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.” Shortly before this nightmare sojourn, however, he had enjoyed a visit to Rome with his then-girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk, who he used to refer to as “Venus.”
    The ways in which the art that he saw on that trip must have informed Basquiat are particularly evident in his ambiguous Untitled. A Roman statue of Venus is paired with a typically expressive female figure with arms outstretched and a head crowned by dynamic ringlets. Above her shines a halo and to her left are pieces of fruit. The bunch of grapes evokes both classical Bacchanalian scenes and a similar still-life in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which Basquiat often admired at MoMA in New York. This painting has also been likened to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and canvases by Cy Twombly.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Venus” at Gagosian Paris, 2024. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian, licensed by Artestar, New York; © Fondazione Torlonia, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

    “[Basquiat] had a great grasp of the history of art and visual culture and was brilliant at bringing the past to life in his paintings,” Larry Gagosian said. “His work reminds us of the common chords and resonances of beauty and identity throughout art history.”

    Capturing the breadth of Basquiat’s references, Untitled has been reunited with another of its inspirations. The statue is on loan from the Torlonia Collection in Rome, the world’s largest private holding of Roman antiquities that is rarely seen in public. In turn, Gagosian is supporting the conservation of the marble figure.
    “We want to bring the viewer closer to the influences that Basquiat was absorbing during his trip to Italy,” explained Gagosian’s senior director in Paris, Serena Cattaneo Adorno. “He was drawing on so many references, gathered on his travels, and he poured them back into the eight [Modena] works, in a series that is unique within his practice for its momentum, operatic emotion and overarching narrative.”
    “The compositions are dominated mostly by single figures, so they give the impression of leitmotifs in an operatic narrative taking place in multiple acts,” she added, “through the characters of an angel, a devil, a prophet, a miser, a farmhand, and—of course—the goddess Venus.”
    Adorno said Gagosian has chosen the Torlonia Venus for how its “complete and perfect form” provides “an evocation of classical motifs that we see strongly influencing Jean-Michel’s thoughts at the moment he created this unparalleled Modena series.”
    “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Venus” is on view at Gagosian Paris through December 20.  More

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    in Exhibitions

    In Montreal, An Exhibition Serves Up the Splendors, Sins, and Silliness of Flemish Art

    In the 16th century, a small sliver of the world became the pulsing nexus of a new world order—and with it blossomed one of the most robust eras in the history of Western art.
    “Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks,” an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, tells the story of the rise of small-but-mighty Flanders from 1400 to 1700, through a curation of some 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and objects (on view through October 25). Oil painting makes up the backbone of the show, with over 130 canvases on view by towering artists including Peter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel, and Anthony Van Dyck, among many others (including several women).
    View of the exhibition Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks. Photo MMFA, Denis Farley
    “This period is important because it had such an outsized impact on the history of art,” said Chloé M. Pelletier, the curator of the Montreal installation of the show. “Here we see the invention of oil painting and the flourishing of the publication industry. The print trade is largely based in Antwerp. In the late 16th century, Antwerp is also at the center of trade for vast global empires.” A new class of people arose in its wake, including middle- and upper-class merchants, bankers, and industrialists with disposable incomes who became engaged in the art world, and the nascent art market, and reshaped what art could be in a wholly novel way.
    “Artists in this era had more possibilities of what they could create. It wasn’t just the Church commissioning an altarpiece,” said Pelletier, “There’s a merchant who wanted a portrait or a devotional work for their own home. The market becomes richer and richer and new genres arise to meet that market. Landscape painting emerges for the first time as an independent genre. We see genre scenes or scenes of daily life as well as those of raucous behavior.”
    View of the exhibition “Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks” 2024. Photo MMFA, Denis Farley
    Curated thematically, rather than chronologically, the exhibition hopes to draw in new audiences who might have preconceived notions of what Flemish art is, and what this show is decidedly not is somber and stuffy. With extensive and rare loans from the Phoebus Foundation in Antwerp, Belgium, which co-organized the exhibition with the Denver Art Museum, viewers are given a sweeping and often sumptuous and at times downright bawdy window into the world of Flemish art. In Montreal, the exhibition is bolstered by 14 additional works from the museum’s collection. “It’s a new way to present this period in a way that’s more dynamic and gives people an access point,” said Pelletier.
    Accompanying the exhibition is a sprawling, 432-page richly illustrated catalogue by Katharina Van Cauteren, the chief of staff of the Phoebus Foundation, who spearheaded the exhibition. After Montreal, the exhibition travels to the Peabody-Essex Museum in Massachusetts.
    With one week left in the Montreal location, we chose a few of the dazzling artworks on view that might help you see Flemish art in a whole new way.
    Frans Snyders, A Pantry with Game (ca. 1640)
    Frans Snyders, A Pantry with Game (about 1640). © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.

    Frans Snyders’s monumental still life A Pantry with Game greets viewers at the entryway to the exhibition, setting the tone for the visual abundance that awaits. Synders, who was a trailblazing still life painter in the 17th century, here builds up a toppling abundance of foods—fowl, lobster, artichokes, wild boar, rabbits, asparagus, fruits, and much more—in the foreground of the composition. The bounty looks as though it might tumble out from the canvas, or the viewer, alternately, might be able to step right in.
    A cup of berries, a shiny lobster, and a bright red tablecloth add a dynamic focal point, at the center, holding the disparate elements together. While imagery such as this would have appealed to the new class of merchants with country homes where they arranged big feasts, the painting also offers a concurrent symbolic reading between desire and restraint at work that would have been legible to people of its time. The leashed dogs on the left of the canvas signify these contradictory impulses between indulgence and reserve.
    Jan Massys, Riddle, The World Feeds Many Fools (ca. 1530)
    Jan Massys, Riddle: The World Feeds Many Fools  (about 1530). © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.
    As the exhibition title “Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools” suggests, one section of the exhibition focuses on the weird and wonderful comedic scenes of the era.  Sometimes paintings of “fools” were intended as warnings against the pitfalls of various temptations. Other times, these over-the-top absurd scenes were intended to engage viewers in a visual game. The painting above, for example, is a rebus, a visual puzzle the viewer is asked to solve. Four symbols appear above the two jester-like men, which form a pictorial riddle. When said aloud the names of the four symbols sound similar to the Dutch idiom  “the world feeds many fools.”  These popular visual riddles are not unlike the meme-culture associating language and imagery we know today.
    Hendrick de Clerck and Denijs van Alsloot, The Garden of Eden with the Four Elements (1613)
    Hendrick de Clerck and Denijs van Alsloot, The Garden of Eden with the Four Elements (1613). © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.
    This visually dazzling painting in oil on copper is a quizzical, but not uncommon mix of Christian and mythological imagery. The painting is the work of two artists. Hendrik de Clerck, a painter of altarpieces and other devotional pictures, who began to focus on cabinet pieces, painted the figures while the landscape is by an artist named Denis van Alsloot. Personifications of the four elements—air, fire, water, and earth—occupy the center of the composition, each surrounded by their defining attributes. These mythical figures are juxtaposed with biblical stories relating to Adam and Eve. Floating above the scene is a heavenly scene of god and a choir of angels. The painting, which hints at European colonial expansions through the exotic animals and fruit pictures, perhaps suggests an idealized scene in which the world exists harmoniously under Christianity.
    Michaelina Wautier, Everyone to His Taste (ca. 1650)
    Michaelina Wautier, Everyone to His Taste  (about 1650) © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.
    This is one of several paintings by women artists included in the exhibition. In her own time, the artist Michaelina Wautier carved an unlikely, but celebrated path as an unmarried woman artist. Born to a wealthy family, her brother was also a painter, and Wautier, in the relative safety of her position, cultivated her talents painting still lifes as well as portraits and history paintings. Over the centuries Wautier was written out of history, with many of her works attributed to her brother. Only a few years ago did a true reappraisal of her legacy begin.
    In this tender and exquisitely luminous painting, two boys interact; one boy in white holds an egg with a bite taken from it while another boy in black reaches as though to snatch it. Wautier represented children in her work on several occasions including a painting of boys blowing bubbles that’s in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. Here the luminous handling of whites and the rosy cheeks of the boys is captivating and so life-like that one is tempted to reach out for the egg, too.

    Peeter Neeffs the Younger and Gillis van Tillborch, Elegant Couple in an Art Cabinet (1652, and ca. 1675)
    Peeter Neeffs the Younger and Gillis van Tillborch, Elegant Couple in an Art Cabinet (1652, and about 1675) © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.
    Perhaps no painting better encapsulates the entirety of the “Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools,” than Elegant Couple in an Art Cabinet. In the early 1600s, a new kind of collector had emerged—the connoisseur. These collectors were knowledgeable about the qualities that defined different artists and genres. With these connoisseurs concurrently arose the ‘kunstkammer’ or the collector cabinets where rooms of artworks and objects were displayed together. These rooms were sometimes depicted on canvas, too. Elegant Couple in an Art Cabinet represents the genre well. The bourgeois Flemish interior features a couple at the center, with recognizable paintings such as Titian’s Rape of Europa and Jacob Jordaens’ Mercury and Argus. What’s truly fascinating about this composition, however, is that macro-XRF scans reveal that the couple was a later addition and that an original group of three male connoisseurs examining the paintings had been painted over. Such paintings reveal that collector cabinet paintings, too, changed hands and were conceived as adaptable scenes that changed with new collectors, a living, shifting creation, rather than a static entity.

    Catarina Ykens II, Vanitas Bust of a Lady (1688) 
    Catarina Ykens II, Vanitas Bust of a Lady (1688). Courtesy of the Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium
    This uncanny image is the work of the artist Catarina Yken, the daughter of artist Jan Ykens. Her paintings are rarely known today, but she is best known for her still-life paintings, especially flowers. This unusual scene of oil paint on oak panel is both a morbid and comic vision. A brown-hued skull with white tufts of hair sits atop a lifelike woman’s bust draped with a pearl necklace, at the bottom of her décolletage, a sprig of leaves and berries catches the attention of a bird perched on her shoulder. Flemish artists, acquainted with the realities of death through war and illness, maintained their characteristic sense of levity. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Doug Wheeler and Ad Reinhardt Offer Different Modes of Minimalism at Two-for-One Shows

    Two very different Minimalist exhibitions are wrapping up this week in New York, from masters of their respective rivulets, Doug Wheeler and Ad Reinhardt. Both reveal the meticulous complexity that goes into creating something deceptively simple. They have radically varying styles and approaches, but both reach for the sublime.
    David Zwirner’s 20th Street location is hosting both shows. The 84-year-old Light and Space pioneer Wheeler’s dreamlike installation “Day Night Day” occupies the ground floor. “Print—Painting—Maquette,” which primarily explores Reinhardt’s late-period printmaking, is on the floor above. Both exhibitions close on October 19. Although the shows are unrelated, they forge such a fluid, accidental dialogue that they feel interconnected. They offer a welcome antidote to the unbearable strife of the news cycle— Reinhardt’s abstractions are serene and cerebral, while Wheeler provides an immersive, otherworldly experience.
    Doug Wheeler, “DN ND WD 180 EN – NY 24” (2024). © Doug Wheeler. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
    Visitors must don protective disposable booties over their shoes to not scuff the pristine matte and gloss white floors of the installation component of Wheeler’s exhibition, “DN ND WD 180 EN – NY 24.” Four visitors are allowed in at a time for two-and-a-half-minute intervals, and the waitlist fills up, so come early. Photos and videos are also not allowed. Viewers enter a room with two faintly glowing rectangular walls. I was initially chuffed and satisfied just by this sole component, until a gallery staffer explained that I could walk through it.
    Doug Wheeler, “DN ND WD 180 EN – NY 24,” 2024 © Doug Wheeler. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
    The wall’s illusory solidity is so palpable it triggers a confusing split second of fear as you trepidatiously step into it and enter a heavenly void where you are surrounded by limitless, luminous space. It’s a transcendent experience, and one that can’t be captured in any of the corny, high-tech experiential exhibitions currently proliferating. Upon exiting the celestial afterlife void, be sure to hang a left to see the artist’s intricate drawings detailing the plans for the work, gorgeous ink and graphite schematics.
    Installation view, “Ad Reinhardt: Print—Painting—Maquette,” David Zwirner, New York, 2024. © Anna Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Courtesy David Zwirner.
    There are also plenty of preparatory studies at Reinhardt’s “Print-Painting-Maquette,” one flight up. The abstract Minimalist (1913–67) has always been an artist both buoyed and stymied by his subtlety—when it comes to photographing his work, the nuances of his chromatic explorations are lost. Those “black” monochromes might read as just one murky, matte shade in a photo, but they encompass a rich, inky world of various hues and almost subliminal patterns.
    Ad Reinhardt, Printer’s maquette for Untitled from X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters) (c. 1964). © Anna Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Courtesy David Zwirner.
    The exhibition was curated by Jeffrey Weiss, formerly curator and head of Modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and organized in collaboration with the Ad Reinhardt Foundation. The 1966 screenprints attest to “his interest in translating the subtleties of his painted work into the print medium,” according to press materials. It’s revelatory to see his diagrams for the prints, based on earlier paintings. This is the first show devoted to these prints, but the various small paintings also included are a more magnetic, visceral draw, creating an intriguing counterpoint to the main focus.
    Taken in together, the shows are an intriguing journey into light and darkness.
    Installation view, “Ad Reinhardt: Print—Painting—Maquette,” David Zwirner, New York, 2024. © Anna Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Courtesy David Zwirner.
    Doug Wheeler, “Day Night Day,” and Ad Reinhardt, “Print—Painting—Maquette,” are on view at David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York, through October 19. More