Eliana Willis

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    in Exhibitions

    ‘The Most Beautiful Artistry Is Hidden’: Watch Photographer Jeff Wall Bend Reality to Stage His Stunning Tableaux

    Often when looking at photographs, we assume they are true, that they recorded an actual event in a particular moment in time, captured with the alchemy of light and sealed with a chemical reaction.
    But photographs are just as often—and perhaps, more often than not—faked. They are staged, cropped, edited, amplified, quieted, and tied to very specific perspectives. Photographs are rarely, if ever, “true.”
    The Vancouver-based photographer Jeff Wall, who investigates precisely this in his work, is dedicated to probing this boundary between reality and fantasy, and seamlessly blending fact and fiction.
    In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the Extended Play series, Wall explains his 2014 work Changing Room, which shows a woman in the midst of trying on clothes inside what looks to be a department store’s fitting room.
    Her bottom half is clad in a floral-patterned skirt, while she pulls a wildly printed frock over her head, obscuring her face. We can see that she’s standing opposite a mirror, flush against the changing room wall.

    Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Jeff Wall: An Impossible Photograph.” © Art21, Inc. 2017.

    “It’s not a mirror image, because if you look at the hangers, they say ‘Barneys’ on them, not backwards,” Wall says in the video. “Therefore, the only thing that you can be seeing is what the mirror sees. So, that’s a picture that can’t be made.”
    This slippage between fact and fiction is at the heart of Wall’s work.
    “If you pay attention to that picture and enjoy it and look at it—get involved in it—it’ll come to you. And when it comes to you, it’ll be exciting” he says.
    So the next time you scroll through Instagram or flip through the pages of a magazine—or take a look at one of Jeff Wall’s photographs—remember his words: “The most beautiful artistry is hidden.”
    Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
    [embedded content]
    This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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    in Exhibitions

    Lithuania’s Award-Winning Venice Biennale Pavilion Is Coming to an Abandoned Swimming Pool Just Outside Berlin

    Lithuania’s Golden Lion-winning pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Sun & Sea, is heading to Germany, where it will be staged in out-of-service 1928 Bauhaus swimming pool. A melancholy opera set on a sandy beach, the performance presents a future where the effects of climate change have reached catastrophic levels, but still do little to disturb carefree sunbathers.
    Theater director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, playwright Vaiva Grainytė, and composer Lina Lapelytė debuted the piece at Vilnius’s National Gallery of Art in 2017. In Venice, the production, translated into English, attracted long lines and immediate critical buzz for its pressing ecological themes and unique staging. Audiences watched from a balcony up above as singers in bathing suits lay on their beach towels, paging through magazines and snacking on strawberries, singing mournfully about the end of the world.
    In Germany, Sun and Sea will go on view May 1, 2021, at E-Werk Luckenwalde, a former East German coal plant less than hour outside of Berlin that was reborn last year as an art center. The swimming pool next door, E-WERK artistic director Helen Turner told Artnet News in an email, was “first built to make use of the power station’s excess heat energy and as a leisure activity for the station’s workers.”
    In keeping with the venue’s efforts to remain carbon neutral, the production will be powered entirely by Kunststrom—which translates to “art current,” or “art stream”—a type of 100 percent renewable electricity produced by German artist Pablo Wendel’s nonprofit art project and energy provider, Performance Electrics gGmbH.
    Co-artistic directors, Helen Turner and Pablo Wendel with their dog Coal in the Bauhaus Stadtbad, 2019. Photo by Lukas Korschan for the FACE.

    “After a challenging year, in which we have been intensely confronted with our own mortality, it is important to continue championing change and remember that our greatest long-term threat to humanity still remains climate change,” Turner said. “Sun & Sea exists as a stark reminder why we must continue to fight for change, to our industry and society as a whole.”
    As in Venice, the project will be crowdfunded, with a campaign due to launch in January to raise the €40,000 to pay for sand, beach chairs, and salaries for 28 performers. (In the meantime, E-Werk is inviting potential donors to reach out via email.)
    Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte, Lina Lapelyte, Sun & Sea (Marina) at Lithuania Biennale Arte 2019, Venice. Photo ©Andrej Vasilenko.

    To ensure the safety of both performers and viewers, tickets, which will be free, are limited. Audiences will watch from the pool’s upper balconies.
    Returning as curator for the German presentation is Lucia Pietroiusti, curator of general ecology at London’s Serpentine Galleries. She’s the guest curator for E-Werk’s annual Power Night program, which will also include new commissions from artists Isabel Lewis, Himali Singh Soin, and Tabita Rezaire.
    “[Sun and Sea] will be essentially the same work as Venice, except for the qualities that the venue brings to the piece when experiencing it,” Pietroiusti told the Art Newspaper. “An empty swimming pool comes with a whole different kind of underlying catastrophe, at least for me.”
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    in Exhibitions

    Martin Whatson “Free” Solo Exhibition @ Dubai’s RexRomae Gallery – December 3rd

    Rom Levy

    Rom Levy
    Rom is the founder & editor in chief of StreetArtNews. In 2009, he launched the ‘StreetArtNews’ website to promote underground art, which widened his scope to work with a larger roster of street artists on events and exhibitions. He is noted as one of the latest figures to help popularize street art and as an authority on the latest trends in urban contemporary art. More

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    in Exhibitions

    All of Your Favorite Memes Are About to Be Recognized as the Works of Art They Truly Are in the First-Ever Memennial

    Add another exhibition to your ever-expanding list of biennials and triennials to see in 2021.
    Now you can tack onto your itinerary Memennial 2020: a Biennial 4 Memes, which will debut in three cities worldwide in December and pay tribute to the phenomenon that has given us doge, ceiling cat, and overly attached girlfriend.
    But the show isn’t just about LOL memes, per the press release’s ambitious opening lines: “Memes move elections / Memes move revolutions / Memes move consciousness / Memes move laughter out of our dark cavernous guts.” And not only that. According to the release, memes “create society.”
    Mirroring their near-instantaneous global spread, the show will take place simultaneously in Seattle, Dallas, and Sydney in the form of meme screenings-cum-dance parties paired with shows of physical artworks, as well as, of course, online exhibits.
    The show was conceived by Dallas artist Anam Bahlam and will be curated by Soomi Han, who earned a BFA at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University this year. Bahlam invited Han to participate after seeing her “Me² Meme Art Exhibition” at SMU.
    “A meme makes you laugh and gives you breath and gives you life,” Bahlam told Artnet News by phone. “Memes are free and authorless and make me think about society a little differently. So I wanted to honor these aesthetic creators.”
    Confirmed artist participants so far include Sylv Martinez, Hannah Epstein, Rowen Foster, and Culture Hole TV. Some of the memesters include Joelle Bouchard (aka namaste.at.home.dad), Jónó Mí ló, and Sad African Queen.
    What’s more, through November 22, you can submit your own memes to the show. And, if you’re an analyst of the phenomenon, you can also submit your insightful commentary.
    For those not up on these things, English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to introduce evolutionary principles to the analysis of the dissemination of cultural phenomena.
    The term is a shortened version of the ancient Greek “mimeme,” or imitated thing, and rhymes with cream. (It is not pronounced may-may or any other way.) It has become widely used to refer to catchy, ironic text-and-image combinations that spread virally online (to Dawkins’s dismay).
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    in Street Art

    “Polvere di Stelle” by INTI in Naples, Italy

    Street artist INTI is back with a new mural entitled “Polvere di Stelle” in the Barra neighborhood in Naples. This project was done in collaboration with the Campania region and Jorit Foundation.

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    “Look with the naked eye, without placebos or metaphysical aspirins. Look without dogma, without wanting to rest on great truths. Look without easy answers that calm doubts, prevents us from seeing poetry in the uncertain and in the minuteness of our place in nature.”

    A visual artist and muralist born in Valparaíso, Chile, INTI creates artworks surly carries out not more than the meaning, he also transmits the warm colours of it. Painting on canvasses, creating sculptures or large murals, his artwork addresses birthplace of the Latin American culture, multiplying it on a global level.
    Today he is one of the most recognized street artists globally. He usually paints murals on a gigantic scale, his works often take up whole sides of buildings. He has painted murals in several cities in Chile and worldwide and has participated in international festivals dedicated to the culture of street and graffiti in Norway, France, Poland, Hawaii and Lebanon amongst others. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Two Landmark US Museum Shows Will Spotlight the Long Overlooked History of Modern and Avant-Garde Korean Art

    The story of 20th-century Korean art is woefully underrepresented to many students of Western art history. But in the coming years, a pair of shows at institutions on either side of the US will aim to correct that. 
    Coming to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2022 is an ambitious survey of modern Korean painting, photography, and sculpture from 1897 to 1965. 
    The show, organized by LACMA’s associate curator of Korean art, Virginia Moon, spans two eras of Korean history—the last gasp of the Joseon dynasty, which lasted over 500 years, until the birth of the independent Korean nation in 1910; and the contemporary era, which includes the period in which Korea split into two sovereign states. 
    “This ‘space between’ the traditional and contemporary is one of the most revealing time periods in Korean history given the historic events… as the country ‘reluctantly’ modernized during this time,” Moon tells Artnet News. 
    Some 140 works of art are expected to be in the show, a selection that includes examples of early 20th-century sculpture and photography that have rarely been shown outside of the country. 
    “It was important to show how the two periods—modern and contemporary—connected, how these different media first appeared in Korea, and how, over time, the modern led to the now,” Moon adds. “The modern art period in Korea, unknown in the US until now, is evidence that contemporary art in Korea did not suddenly appear out of a void.”
    Installation view of “Lee Seung-taek,” 2017, at the Palazzo Caboto in Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy.

    The exhibition is the second of three shows planned in conjunction with a 10-year-long partnership with Hyundai. (Through the program—the largest corporate partnership in the museum’s history—the South Korean automobile company has committed to fund both the exhibition efforts and a series of acquisitions and publications in the field of Korean art.) The first of the bunch, a historical presentation of Korean writing and calligraphy practices, took place at the museum last year.
    The third exhibition will take place in 2022. 
    Meanwhile, in the spring of 2022, the Guggenheim in New York will present “The Avant-Garde: Experimental Art in South Korea, in 1960s-1970s.” The museum calls it the first exhibition in North America to explore the wave of experimentalist artists that rose to prominence in the decades following the Korean War of the early 1950s, such as Lee Kang-so, Lee Kun-yong, and Lee Seung-taek.
    “Spanning the 1960s and the 1970s, this upcoming presentation examines a group of loosely affiliated artists whose artistic production reflected and responded to the rapidly changing and globalizing socio-political and material conditions that shaped South Korea,” a representative from the museum says of the show. “It reveals the innovative approach to art-making by a remarkable generation of Korean artists and features seminal works in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and film.” 
    The exhibition was co-organized by Kyung An, an assistant curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim, and Soojung Kang, a senior curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. It will be presented in tandem at both institutions.
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    Here Are the 28 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Artists Participating in a Citywide Show in Chicago Celebrating the Grant’s 40th Anniversary

    Twenty-eight artists who have MacArthur “Genius” grants will come together for a single exhibition, spread across nearly 20 venues in Chicago.
    Opening in summer 2021, “Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40” will include grantees such as Nicole Eisenman, LaToya Ruby Frazier, David Hammons, and Kerry James Marshall.
    Organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the exhibition will take place across multiple venues, including the DuSable Museum of African American History, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as community organizations such as BBF Family Services and municipal organizations including the Chicago Housing Authority.
    “Particularly these days and in these troubled times, it is an absolute privilege to work with these artists,” the exhibition’s curator, Abigail Winograd, said in a phone interview. “It keeps one from falling into despair when I can spend so much, at least, virtual time with people who remind me every day that things can get better, since they have track records of being able to use their work to make the world better. It’s a dream to be in this position.”
    Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Journey (2020). Photo illustration. Courtesy of the artist.

    The show revolves around the concept of “the commons,” defined by MacArthur-winning author Lewis Hyde as “a social regime for managing a common resource.” Common resources like air, water, and art and culture, Winograd says, are not equally available, and access to them has, if anything, been increasingly curtailed.
    The exhibition will include community-based projects, some of which are already underway, as well as solo and group shows at the various venues.
    A piece by Mel Chin, installed at the Sweet Water Foundation, brings to Chicago a community artwork he did in New Orleans related to lead remediation. Meanwhile, pieces by the Nigerian artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby will be installed in buildings run by the Chicago Housing Authority, and photographer Wendy Ewald will collaborate with teenagers through Centro Romero, which supports immigrants, on a photographic project.
    “We started three years ago out of a sense of social urgency, which has grown more and more pressing,” Winograd said. “We were talking about a set of issues that remain relevant and in some ways have become even more painfully relevant.”
    See a full list of the participating artists below.
    Njideka Akunyili CrosbyIda ApplebroogDawoud BeyMark BradfordMel ChinNicole EisenmanWendy EwaldLaToya Ruby FrazierJeffrey GibsonGuillermo Gómez-PeñaGary HillDavid HammonsAlfredo JaarToba KhedooriAn-My LêWhitfield LovellRick LoweIñigo Manglano-OvalleKerry James MarshallJulie MehretuAmalia Mesa-BainsTrevor PaglenFazal SheikhShahzia SikandeKara WalkerCarrie Mae WeemsFred WilsonXu Bing
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    ‘It’s Memorializing How Unmemorable It Is’: Artist Michael Mandiberg on Painting Melancholy Portraits on Zoom

    Quarantining has no doubt had a dissociative effect on us. Think about the strange ways in which time passes, or the moments during video chats when you have to remind yourself you’re speaking to a real person and not just watching TV. 
    It’s the old paradox of modern technology: the more it connects us, the more disconnected we feel. And it’s inside that paradox that Michael Mandiberg’s newest body of work, “Zoom Paintings,” lives. 
    Stuck in place over the past seven months, the artist, who is immunocompromised, has meticulously painted the backgrounds of those with whom they’ve video chatted—albeit with the person removed. 
    The resulting canvases, all the size of the artist’s computer screen, are going on view this week in a (fittingly) virtual exhibition hosted by Denny Dimin gallery. 

    “What I was experiencing in that time was just a real feeling of aloneness and dissociation,” Mandiberg tells me over Zoom, looking up from their desk. The artist is painting my own backdrop as we speak; our conversation is punctuated with longer-than-normal pauses as they work through an unknown section of the scene.
    “I was in all these different spaces but they all looked the same. Normally we would be in a specific room at a specific institution. Now it’s all this weird nowhere space,” Mandiberg says before nodding back to the artwork in progress.
    So it goes for the project, which the artist has been working on since April. During most of Mandiberg’s Zoom calls—faculty meetings, studio visits, family members’ birthdays—they’ll quietly pick a participant’s video and paint the scene. Sometimes they’ll tell their subjects; often—especially in big group chats—they won’t.
    Michael Mandiberg, Eyebeam Rapid Response For A Better Digital Future Welcome I, 12:00 — 2:00 PM, June 30, 2020 (#16) (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

    The gesture of making the digital physical is one Mandiberg has turned to before. The artist’s best-known body of work, Print Wikipedia (2009–16), is built around the inherently sisyphean task of printing out the entire encyclopedia’s database. 
    But this new project is not that. Though a literal materialization of an ephemeral experience takes place, the “Zoom Paintings” aren’t about capturing a particular combination of ones and zeroes. In true conceptual fashion, it’s in the act of painting—rather than the painting itself—that the heart of the artwork beats.  
    Driving this point home is the fact that Mandiberg is not a traditionally “good” painter. The artist will be the first to tell you. (They were never formally trained in painting.) And for this upcoming exhibition at least, the works will be presented in the digital sphere where they were born. The gallery will present the artworks on a public Zoom every day through the run of the show.
    “For me, it’s a way to think about how I can use these tools of the moment to talk about the tools of the moment,” Mandiberg says.
    Michael Mandiberg, Sara Clugage wiknic, 3:00 — 4:00 PM, August 16, 2020 (#23) (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

    Unlike so many articles written in April about “what your quarantine bookshelf says about you,” Mandiberg isn’t interested in the decor of their subjects’ self-made lazarettos. There’s a blurring of details in these paintings. Stare at them long enough, and they all start to blend—just the way the gridded videos do on our own screens during a long meeting.
    That’s why the subjects are removed, too. “It’s not about you,” Mandiberg sums up. “It’s about the interchangeability of people and places. It’s not memorializing a particular event; it’s memorializing how unmemorable it is.” 
    Before this article was published, Mandiberg posted the painting from my Zoom screen to Instagram. I only half-recognized at it first, like seeing oneself in an old picture.
    “Michael Mandiberg: The Zoom Paintings” will be on view on Denny Dimin Virtual November 12–25, 2020.
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