Exhibitions

You could hear the deep droning hum even before the black granite block that housed the Australian pavilion came into view, and feel the vibrations as you approached it in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale. Inside, those who braved it past the threshold were bombarded with a wall of amps, a giant floor-to-ceiling LED screen, a cacophony of black-and-white images, and abrasive Noise-metal and feedback. 
When I visited the pavilion during the Biennale’s opening in April, the soundscape was so massive, the deluge of images so disorienting, that it was easy to miss the man sitting on a road case, next to the row of amps, with his back to the room. But Marco Fusinato, the artist and musician behind the work DESASTRES, was almost always there—playing a sleek, EGC aluminum guitar and effect pedals every day of the Biennale’s 200-day run. 
DESASTRES (2022) Solo durational performance as installation 200 days. Installation view, Australia Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti.
Sometimes the pavilion was full of viewers who succumbed to the meditative qualities this overpowering sensory experience could offer, and sat down to let the work wash over them for hours. And sometimes Fusinato was there alone, playing at deafening volumes as the images on the monumental screen would come and go, washing the pavilion with light, then infusing it with darkness. 
“It’s very divisive. Either you love it or you hate it. There’s not much in between,” Fusinato told Artnet News during an interview between live music sessions. He was nearly an hour late to our conversation but the energy inside the pavilion was so ecstatic that he told us he had lost track of time. The improvised sound emanating from the amps triggered an AI system that spat out images from the artist’s personal archive and at that point, it was “just right,” he said, so he “went down that path.”
The interplay of the sound with the technology that randomized the images—what Fusinato calls the “Score”—and the energy inside the space was never the same. “I’m always searching for something that I can’t quantify; it’s a feeling. And then you might find it and you sit on it for a while. It can take you places,” he said.
A Punk Gig Without a Stage 
The 59th Venice Biennale came to a close on November 27, and it is often the case that national pavilions schedule live performances, talks, or other public-engagement programs during the final week, as La Serenissima once again fills with art professionals and visitors rushing to view one of the artworld’s most important exhibitions before it closes. But Fusinato had been putting on a unique live event day-in-and-day-out for seven months, at times conjuring a high-intensity concentration of raw energy that is nothing short of life affirming. 
And that, in spite of the fact that DESASTRES, which evokes Francisco Goya’s suite of etchings Los Desastres de la Guerra (1810-20), doesn’t exactly uplift. The images in Fusinato’s archive, amassed during Australia’s long lockdowns, are as discordant as his doom and death metal references. They range from found news images of civil protests, war, and manmade disasters, to historical illustrations of torture and bloodletting, among many other motifs, some less identifiable. 
“DESASTRES is a monster,” Alexie Glass-Kantor, the pavilion’s curator, said in her opening address. “A banquet of images that range from the benign to the blatant, absurd, twisted, sublime, bone-crushing, and tense.” 
The images’ sequence and combinations might have been confounding, but they clearly speak of our endless capacity for violence and destruction. And in the 200-days since Fusinato first switched on the amps, disasters and war continued to rage around the world, their digital images popping up on our personal screens. 
DESASTRES (2022). Solo durational performance as installation 200 days. Installation view, Australia Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale.Photographer: Andrea Rossetti.
The audience could walk around the amps and LED monitor, cables and wires exposed, and get behind the huge screen, where the connections between the panels flickered in a hypnotizing sequence of red and green. The only other element of color in the space was a small 400-year-old painting of a decapitated head placed neatly on a red book. The artist found this memento mori at auction while searching for images online and felt compelled to buy it. It was the pavilion’s “mascot” as he put it, and he moved it around in the space every day. 
For Fusinato, the work’s openness allowed visitors to bring their own experiences into it. “There are many elements coming together here: the aesthetics of noise, music and time, underground subgenres, extreme music, and decayed imagery,” he said. “Some people may have never experienced volume at this level or that kind of noise concert, which has a very particular aesthetic and philosophical code.” But whether a viewer could recognize such codes is secondary to its cathartic effect, he pointed out. “It’s an attitude.” 
Some found this collusion of the elements of spectacle confusing, and would get too close to the artist. “They treat me like a marble sculpture! I have to tell them to fuck off,” he said. 
“It’s a bit like a punk gig and, essentially, when they walk into the pavilion they’re walking onto a stage, but in this context, it’s really like we’re all on the same platform, so that’s been something to constantly negotiate,” he added. 
A Sharper Focus
Born in Melbourne in 1964, Fusinato’s roots are here in the Veneto region, where his parents emigrated from, and he considers the steadily disappearing local dialect of the Belluno province his first language. “I’m here representing Australia, but I also have an Italian passport and I feel like I don’t belong in either. I’m here making work. I can’t take on the baggage and absurdity of any form of nationalism,” he said. 
During the long months in the Giardini, as audiences came and went and a new far-right Italian government came to power, Fusinato found a community in the guards, cleaners, and invigilators—the workers meant to go unnoticed. “I really wanted to create that kind of environment that’s welcoming and in the same spirit as the work,” he said. (It also helps that the Australian pavilion is one of the few with a kitchen and bathroom.) 
Clocking in eight hours a day in the pavilion proved to be a unique luxury that brought certain things into focus. “It’s been very much about labor and occupying space. What’s been eliminated is administration, Zoom meetings, and all this kind of stuff that so much of our time is given over to. It’s been so liberating to prioritize that instead of all that other kind of drag,” he said.
Fusinato didn’t want to abandon this feeling and let this emphasis fade away when the pavilion closed and life went on. He is making plans to funnel the electrifying impressions that he had accumulated in the past months into a live situation for a large audience. “This project originally began with a drummer who plays in death metal grindcore bands,” he explained, but the idea that the drumming would trigger the images was abandoned along the way. 
Now, Fusinato is thinking of pursuing it in a future show or music gig. But the intimacy inside the space and the intensity of the moments in which Fusinato’s guitar fed on the audience’s palpable energy will remain a unique experience, like a legendary concert. You were either there or you weren’t.
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The most in-depth survey of the Beastie Boys—the New York trio that shifted the plates of punk, rap, and hip-hop over a four-decade career—is opening at Beyond the Streets’s flagship gallery in Los Angeles on December 10.
“Exhibit” will gather previously unseen objects, artifacts, and personal items in its chronicle of the group’s history and legacy. There are notebooks and instruments bearing out the Beasties’s creative approach throughout the years, concert memorabilia pointing to their global footprint, and original album art highlighting their myriad collaborations with visual artists. 
“There’s so much more that I’m sure we could do a 15,000-square foot exhibition,” Roger Gastman, founder of Beyond the Streets, told Artnet News. “But this is where we’re gonna start.”
Photo: courtesy of Beyond the Streets.
The Beastie Boys originally emerged as a hardcore punk outfit in the early 1980s, before hitting gold when they began incorporating rap, then emergent, into their repertoire. The band’s fast-selling debut album, 1986’s Licensed to Ill, commenced a run of eight records that saw it variously test the boundaries of hip-hop with rock, jazz, funk, and experimental soundscapes to platinum-selling effect. 
The group dissolved in 2012, following the death of founding member Adam Yauch (aka MCA). 
In 2018, the surviving Beasties, Michael Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horowitz (Ad-Rock), released Beastie Boys Book. A loving retrospective, the hardback volume detailed the band’s lifespan—from its punk roots to its final show at the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee—through photographs, essays, comic strips, and the odd recipe. 
The New York Times called it a “fascinating, generous book,” but Gastman had a more pertinent question: “Where’s all the stuff from the book?” His hope was to gather the many objects featured in Beastie Boys Book for an installation to coincide with the book tour. “This would be the closest for people to come to them, their creativity and energy,” he said. “[The group] said sure, so we figured it out and we did it.”
The installation was staged as part of Beyond the Streets’s 2019 exhibition in New York. According to Gastman, there were talks with museums about hosting further shows, but the pandemic put a damper on those plans. So when Beyond the Streets, already much-celebrated as a traveling exhibition, launched its permanent gallery space in September, a Beastie Boys exhibition was “high on our minds,” said Gastman. 
Photo: courtesy of Beyond the Streets.
“We don’t want our flagship space to just be an art gallery where we sell art,” he added. “Education through entertainment, telling stories, and museum exhibitions are all things we want to do, plan to do, and are doing. The Beastie Boys seemed like such an incredible start to that storytelling.”
“Exhibit,” however, goes further in telling the story of the rap group by logging its entwinement with art and style. Featured in the show will be the original drawings by Cey Adams for the Beasties’s first hip-hop release “Cooky Puss,” Check Your Head letterings by Eric Haze, Hello Nasty toy designs by Bill McMullen, and early photographs by Glen E. Friedman. The Beastie Boys’s choice of footwear—Adidas, of course—is likewise represented.
Gastman himself is excited about displaying the group’s 30- to 40-year cache of handwritten lyrics, capturing not just its creative evolution, but a process that has been lost with the advent of smart technology.
“The Beasties’s approach to everything was so original, unique, and respectful of their history that it has permeated culture,” he emphasized. “They weren’t just a hip-hop group, they weren’t just punk rockers—they did everything.”
“Exhibit” will be on view at Beyond the Streets, 434 N La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, December 10, 2022–January 28, 2023. Tickets are complimentary and available to reserve here.
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An exhibition showcasing 51 Ukrainian avant-garde artworks that narrowly escaped the recent bombing of Kyiv will go on view next week in Spain. The show will kick off what could be a series of traveling exhibitions to promote and safeguard Ukraine’s cultural heritage amid the ongoing war.
Titled “In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s,” the show is branded as the most comprehensive survey of Ukraine’s avant-garde movement. It is organized by Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and supported by Museums for Ukraine, an initiative formed by art-world players to protect the country’s cultural heritage. It will open on November 29 with a video message from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Featuring works by 26 artists including masters of Ukrainian modernism Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermilov, Viktor Palmov, and Anatol Petrytskyi, the exhibition will present a total of 69 works on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema of Ukraine, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and other private collections. The selected works, some of which have never been seen by the public, chronicle Ukraine’s avant-garde art movement during the first decades of the 20th century as it explored figurative art, futurism, and constructivism.
The show is curated by Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova, and Olena Kashuba-Volvach, with support from the Embassy of Ukraine in Spain and PinchukArtCentre, as well as blessings from the office of the President of Ukraine and the Spanish Ministry of Culture.
The artworks arrived in Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Courtesy Museums for Ukraine.
The majority of the works in the show—51 of 69—were transported out of the Ukrainian capital in a secret convoy early on November 15, just hours before more than 100 missiles rained down on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, targeting energy facilities. It was one of the worst missile strikes since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, according to Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, the art patron behind the rescue mission and the Madrid exhibition, which was planned with record speed.
“The Kunsttrans trucks were packed in secrecy to safeguard the visual reference of the largest and most important export of Ukraine’s cultural heritage to have departed from the country since the beginning of the war,” Thyssen-Bornemisza, founder of Museums for Ukraine and a board member of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, said in a statement. Thyssen-Bornemisza is also the founder and chair of TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary).
Kunsttrans, the Austrian art logistics and handling firm, was the only company willing to take on the task and remained in close contact with the drivers throughout the risky journey, Thyssen-Bornemisza noted.
Artworks were loading onto Kunsttrans’s truck, which transported the artworks outside of Ukraine just hours before Russia’s missiles strikes rained down on the country on November 15. Courtesy Museums for Ukraine.
“The convoy was 400 kilometers outside of the city when the worst of the bombing took place,” she recounted. “As the convoy approached the border, crossing at Rava-Rus’ka, a stray missile accidentally fell near the Polish village Przewodow, near the border to Ukraine. NATO was on high alert and Poland went into emergency sessions.” At that point, the trucks were 50 kilometers away from where the missile had landed.
The works arrived in Madrid on November 20, thanks in part to a special intervention from Miguel Iceta, the culture minister of Spain. Such an ambitious loan would normally take at least two years to approve and plan; this one was completed in a matter of weeks.
Since the beginning of the war, more than 500 cultural heritage sites, buildings, and institutions have been destroyed, according to the Ukrainian government’s records. There have also been numerous reports of Russia’s looting of cultural artifacts from Ukraine.
“It is becoming clearer day by day that Putin’s war against Ukraine is not only about occupying territory but it is also about controlling the nation’s narrative,” Thyssen-Bornemisza said.
The artworks arrived in Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Courtesy Museums for Ukraine.
A symposium bringing together key cultural figures—including Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands, president of the European Cultural Foundation; Olena Kashuba-Volvach, curator of the National Art Museum of Ukraine; Pina Picierno, vice-president of the European Parliament; as well as curators and representatives of the European Commission—will take place on November 28 prior to the opening ceremony. The symposium is open to the public in the form of a webinar via this link.
The exhibition at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza will run until April 2023, when it will travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
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Street art will take center stage in the U.K. with the February opening of “Beyond the Streets London”, a major survey at the Saatchi Gallery. The exhibition will explore the impact of over 150 artists and the movements with which they were associated, including Hip-Hop and Punk Rock.
The sprawling show will fill the entirety of the gallery’s 70,000 square-foot space for the first time in eight years, with presentations of original art and site-specific installations alongside new special commissions. Archival documents such as photography, fashion objects, and rare ephemera, will also be shown to explain the history of the works. 
The exhibition’s curator is Roger Gastman, a leading specialist in graffiti who has staged several museum-scale shows across the U.S. in the years since he co-curated the much-acclaimed “Art in the Streets” show at L.A. MoCA in 2011. 
Co-curated with the L.A. museum’s then-director Jeffrey Deitch, the groundbreaking exhibition elevated an art form that had been mostly marginalized by the mainstream art world and examined its complex history. With over 200,000 visitors, it broke the California institution’s attendance records and subsequent blockbusters followed, including one housed in an office building in New York in 2019. 
A permanent dedicated gallery called Beyond the Streets opened in L.A. just this past September. “Our collector base, our audience just kept asking for more,” Gastman told Artnet News at the time. 
Making an effort to honor the present as well as the past, its inaugural show linked the work of established legends like Eric HAZE and Lady Pink with a newer generation of artists such as Othelo Gervacio and POSE. 
“I don’t want to say I’m the grumpy old man who only cares about historical things, but I want to continue to dig up the stories of the culture of graffiti and street art before they disappear,” said Gastman.
“The story of graffiti and street art can’t be told without highlighting the significant role London, and the U.K. in general, played,” Gastman has said about his latest project at the Saatchi Gallery.
The London exhibition will show street art’s far-reaching influence, from underground social movements to many aspects of mainstream contemporary culture, including what we wear and what we listen to.
“Beyond the Streets London” is on view at the Saatchi Gallery, London, February 17–May 9, 2023. Tickets can be purchased in advance here. 
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While the miniature sets and puppetry pieces soon to be unveiled at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) may look like a nod to December’s booming toy sales, they were actually assembled for the New York institution’s latest motion picture-focused exhibition, “Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio.” Opening on December 11, the show takes a behind-the-scenes look at “Pinocchio”—the award-winning filmmaker’s new, undeniably dark, stop-motion take on Carlo Collodi’s classic 1883 children’s story. 
Featuring new plot developments courtesy of Del Toro, “Pinocchio” is the Mexican filmmaker’s first stop-motion animation film. He co-directed the film with stop motion animator Mark Gustafson, who is making his feature directorial debut. The film is already in select theaters and will be available on Netflix on December 9. 
Netflix first pitched the show to MoMA last year, while “Pinocchio” was still in production in Portland and Guadalajara, the museum’s film curator, Ron Magliozzi, told Artnet News. He and the exhibition’s co-curator Brittany Shaw traveled to Oregon for their preliminary meeting with Del Toro in October 2021. “Collaborative effort was important,” Magliozzi recalled of their initial conversation. “We went into the first day of visiting the studio with that in mind.”
“Crafting Pinocchio” unfolds across four floors: it begins with several retellings of the story, including a 2002 edition illustrated by Gris Grimly (which inspired Del Toro), to help contextualize Del Toro’s film, before delving into the film’s pre-production and production stages. It culminates with a program of film features, including several screenings of Del Toro’s “Pinocchio”, from December 22 to December 29, as well as a larger retrospective of all 12 of the filmmaker’s feature films, from December 2022 until January 2023.
Magliozzi has curated previous shows at MoMA around Pixar (2005–06) and Tim Burton (2009), but those focused heavily on concept art—a stage in the animation process that is falling away due to digital tools. “Crafting Pinocchio” shows the shift to research-based studies to create scenery and costumes. 
Mackinnon & Saunders. Puppet making at the Shadow Machine workshop. Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” (2022). Image courtesy Netflix
Del Toro’s version is set in Fascist Italy and his team went to great lengths to accurately depict a typical 1930s Italian town by diligently scouring historical studies and even topographical maps to fine-tune details such as the color of the sky and even the shape of acorns.
They even used vegetables like cauliflower and mushrooms to imagine the textures of fantastical characters. Those concepts grew into maquettes, paper standards, and then full puppets, cast from the very acrylic molds on view in illuminated cases throughout “Crafting Pinocchio.” Interestingly, Del Toro spent his early career in special effects, even making molds himself.
Full-sized puppets were only made for main characters that required close-up shots, like Pinocchio, whereas a background puppet is six inches tall at most, and pretty much flat at just half an inch thick. The life-sized Pinocchio from the film will be on view, but he doesn’t look like the Disney version’s real boy. Del Toro sifted through over 232 Italian adaptations of Pinocchio to understand the character’s nuance and tie it back to his own vision.
This vision is honored in the exhibition with three new video works in a lower gallery that connect themes throughout Del Toro’s film practice.
To give audiences a sense of what production was like, the curators shipped lighting rigs, dragon screens, five working sets, and four large set pieces, including the largest—a church—from Portland. They’re all puppet sized, disassembling easily so puppeteers can bring scenes to life and be captured up close by cameras so everything appears scaled to real life.
Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” joins projects like Henry Selick and Jordan Peele’s Netflix film “Wendell & Wild” in updating stop motion’s clunky Christmas special ubiquity. Puppets are more sophisticated now and so is digital film, which allows for faster shots and quicker review. And while Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” still used CGI during post production, Magliozzi said limitations were imposed to retain the film’s “handcrafted” feeling.
Guillermo del Toro on the set of “Pinocchio” (2022). Image courtesy Jason Schmidt/Netflix
Ephemera such as alternative movie posters and time-lapse videos of the animators in action will also feature at MoMA, alongside an animation schedule board from the Portland studio, complete with pushpins and rubber bands. “They’re like 10 feet tall,” Magliozzi said. “You think that would be done on a computer, but it’s apparently too complicated and easier to deal with this way.”
While the props, puppets, and sets selected by the curators share the film’s story, people power has proved to be the most important element in the film’s creation. The puppets were made both on- and off-site by companies such as the U.K.-based studio, Mackinnon & Saunders, with some craftspeople making them in their apartments during the pandemic. Meanwhile, at the studios, teams of animators would often work on the same scenes at the same time as it can take dozens of animators a full week just to get several minutes of footage.
It is fitting, therefore, that the last thing visitors see before leaving “Crafting Pinocchio” is a wall of Polaroid portraits featuring every craftsperson who worked on Del Toro’s film.
“All the artists working in the studio had to have a Polaroid taken when they started their first day of work,” Magliozzi recalled. Even as people left the crew, their photos remained and new ones were added as people joined the team.
If you pick up an audio guide, you’ll even hear some of the voices behind those faces narrating “Crafting Pinocchio.” 
“Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio,” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 11, 2022–April 15, 2023.
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