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      As Performa Returns, Here Are Highlights From the First Two Decades of New York’s Sometimes Messy, Always Memorable Performance Art Biennial

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      When Marina Abramović re-created Joseph Beuys’s legendary performance piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), at the inaugural Performa Biennial at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2005, there was little hint that performance art was about to transcend its previously niche status. 
      Since that initial outing, however, a parade of international artists—some well-known, others on the cusp of becoming so—have produced a vast, vibrant, and surprising body of installations, plays, dances, videos, and happenings. Along the way, Performa has arguably commissioned or presented a masterpiece or two. Says art historian RoseLee Goldberg, who founded and still helms Performa as director and chief curator: “We showed this work could reach a much different audience. We made people very curious.”
      Seventeen years on, Performa can take some credit for the rise of the event-hungry experiential economy. It has altered or accelerated artists’ careers, changed the architecture and programming of museums, spurred copycat events, and encouraged artists to become multimedia and multi-platform. It has even presaged the rebirth of the creative collectives that are today fueling the NFT art market, And, not incidentally, it helped heal New York City after 9/11.
      As the ninth edition kicks off on Tuesday, October 12, with a three-week slate of events conceived for outdoor locations throughout New York City, here is a look back at what mattered, and what’s coming.

      2005
      RoseLee Goldberg, founding director and curator of Performa. Photo: Patrick McMullan
      Performance art is notoriously difficult to sell, so it is ironic that its rise coincided with a great art-market boom, during which the auction houses had (temporarily) grabbed the spotlight. Performance art as we think of it now is roughly a century old—dating back to the Futurist movement circa 1909—but collectors only knew it from grainy archival footage of 1960s–70s events that just looked peculiar. 
      Building on this canon, however, and coming out of left field, Performa 05 was anchored by Abramović’s magnetic marathon of several classics of the genre. Her weeklong run of the Guggenheim’s rotunda was unlike much of what was available at the time as either culture or entertainment, and gradually grew packed with open-mouthed young people who might normally have been at the movies. They encircled Abramović, entranced. By the final days, the festival had a “don’t miss this” buzz. Performa had keyed into the FOMO that was later to grip the millennial generation.

      2007
      Christian Jankowski’s Rooftop Routine (2007), commissioned for Performa 07. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
      If Performa 05 seemed conjured out of thin air, by November 2007, the city and the artistic community were eagerly anticipating an even larger program. But the second edition went on to establish a recurring theme in Performa history: the big names often don’t end up doing the most important pieces.
      Take the marquee event, Francesco Vezzoli’s interpretation of Pirandello’s 1917 play Right You Are (If You Think You Are), with a glamorous cast topped by Cate Blanchett. But, as its premiere was delayed into the night, art-world swells queued up on Fifth Avenue, cranky and smoking like Magritte chimneys (it was, after all, 2007). The New York Times dubbed the show “court entertainment in the guise of suburban dinner theater.”
      Instead, celebrity-free pieces captivated: a claymation horror film by Nathalie Djurberg and the silly, delirious Rooftop Routine. On roofs in lower Manhattan, some two dozen performers spun in hula hoops in a piece choreographed by video artist Christian Jankowski. Was it just by chance that those very same rooftops had given New Yorkers a searing view of the Twin Towers four years earlier? The piece reclaimed those spaces. And the ebullient, wacky hula-hooping image became emblematic of Performa.

      2009
      Jennifer Rubell, Creation, the Performa 09 opening night benefit dinner. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
      By its third iteration, everybody wanted in: Guy Ben-Ner, Wangechi Mutu, Joan Jonas, and The Bruce High Quality Foundation were just a handful of participants. This year, Performa notched more than 150 artists and 80 locations.
      But there was a problem: the Great Recession. Performa 09’s opening gala—designed by artist and “eventist” Jennifer Rubell—needed to skew spectacular, not glamorous. So, at Dia:Chelsea, hundreds of BBQ ribs sat in a heap under a dripping honeycomb as superstar chef Mario Batali ladled on sauce. The bar, inside a freight elevator, was self-serve. Guests commuted between floors deemed “heaven” and “hell.” Hell featured dessert and Jeff Koons: full-size replicas of his famous stainless-steel rabbit, made of chocolate.
      The golden ticket was for Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done. Inspired by yearbook photos, it was one of Performa’s more successful dance pieces. The show combined a game of basketball, a horn section and, curiously but arrestingly, a parade of shiny, naked men carrying ladders.

      2011
      Ragnar Kjartansson, Bliss (2011), commissioned for Performa 11. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
      By now, Performa had found its groove, if not a fixed formula: a mix of dissonance and dissidents, visual opulence, inside jokes, nudity, and absurdity. Not all works were successful by any means. But this year Performa had possibly its greatest: the hypnotic Bliss.
      “Hypnotic” is an overused adjective in the art world, but Ragnar Kjartansson’s show was exactly that—even narcotic. Simply put, a small group of opera singers and musicians performed the last three minutes of the gorgeous final aria of The Marriage of Figaro—again and again and again, for 12 hours. An act of beauty, insanity, will, and stamina, it was a cultural car crash scored by Mozart, with some performers seemingly running out of breath, others serving water to exhausted colleagues, some bouncing the melodies back and forth to each other as one singer seemed on the verge of giving up. Audience members sat for hours, and then returned for more.

      2013
      Rashid Johnson, Dutchman (2013), commissioned for Performa 13. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
      This was the year that performance art hit the mainstream, as Jay-Z danced with Goldberg and Abramović in a video. Performa inaugurated global “pavilions.” And Rashid Johnson tackled his first performance piece, a production of Amiri Baraka’s 1960s-era play Dutchman. 
      A sauna in a Lower East Side bathhouse was used to replicate the tight quarters of a subway car. Wrapped in bath towels and slicked with sweat, art lovers gathered for a searing staging of the work in which a chat between a Black man and a white woman turns brutal.
      Dutchman changed the course of Johnson’s career, Goldberg noted, putting him “in a new framework”: He decided he liked bigger projects.

      2015
      Edgar Arceneaux, Until, Until, Until… (2015), commissioned for Performa 15 and Malcolm McLaren Award winner. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
      This year’s most memorable piece, by artist Edgar Arceneaux, righted a historical wrong. In 1981, Broadway and Roots star Ben Vereen was invited to appear at the Reagan inauguration. His act was two-part, and controversial. In the first part, saluting the great black vaudeville performer Bert Williams, Vereen took the stage in blackface and belted a boisterous “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” In the second part, Vereen, still as Williams, acted out an attempt to buy drinks for cheering members of the audience—but, in the piece, he was denied service.
      ABC did not air the second half. Instead, it cut to commercial, then to Donny and Marie Osmond. Vereen was sharply criticized in the Black community for indulging in minstrelsy for seemingly little reason. Arceneaux’s play Until, Until, Until… restaged Vereen’s full performance. It was heartbreakingly beautiful.

      2017
      Threeasfour, Fest (2013). Presented by the Jewish Museum for Performa 13. Photo by Chani Bockwinkel, courtesy of Performa.
      threeASFOUR, Fest (2013), presented by the Jewish Museum for Performa 13. Photo: Chani Bockwinkel. Courtesy of Performa.
      South African artist William Kentridge, a Performa veteran, this time took the stage with a roar. His piece was based on a Dadaist work presented by Kurt Schwitters in 1932. Ursonate (primal sonata)’s series of nonsense sounds were transformed into a passionate lecture, opera, and conversation. Barbara Kruger, not to be outdone, took over a skate park on the Lower East Side.
      More intimate was fashion collective threeASFOUR’s Fest. I brought, with some trepidation, my elderly aunt—for decades a seamstress in New York’s fashion business—to the show. In a series of actions around clothing that almost seemed religious, the audience engaged in ritual hand-washing, then pulled chunks of freshly baked bread from the performers’ outfits and shared the food with them. My aunt, 97, was mesmerized.

      2019
      Paul Pfeiffer, University of Georgia Redcoat Band Live (2019), commissioned for Performa 19. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
      Performa is rarely visually subtle, and this year, The Immortals, artist Samson Young’s interpretation of a Chinese folk tale, employed giant construction cranes lit in rainbow colors.
      Paul Pfeiffer’s Redcoat Marching Band/R, staged at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, was even louder. Presenting a “soundtrack to one of America’s most popular mass rituals”—the football game—Pfeiffer orchestrated an unlikely juxtaposition. Fifty members of the University of Georgia band came playing and marching into the Apollo as, onscreen, the rest of the 400-member troupe joined in back in the university’s stadium.
      There were scattered technical and sound problems. But one look at the nutty, glorious delight and raw confusion on the faces of the trumpet-blowing Georgia students swarming the Apollo was unforgettable.

      2021
      Sara Cwynar, Sahara from SSENSE.com (As Young as You Feel) (2020). Image courtesy of the artist
      This year, Covid-19 has curtailed the crew to mostly U.S. artists, and trimmed the number of commissions to eight, all outside. They are staged at some of New York’s legendary locations: Top of the Rock, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Rockaway Beach among them. A telethon kicks off October 12. Everything will be streamed live.
      This year’s slate includes commissions from Tschabalala Self, who wrote a play to be enacted at Jackie Robinson Park in front of sets she painted. Erika Beckman will mount an elaborate, anticapitalist Jack and the Beanstalk in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Sara Cwynar offers a searing look at the advertising industry, staged within a shuttered Fifth Avenue retailer. Kevin Beasley will create a sound sculpture of, and on, the Lower East Side’s Orchard and Rivington Streets.
      Goldberg told Artnet News that when Performa first began, “New York was the star of the show, it couldn’t be anything else.” That fondness and focus returns this year—and, one hopes, so does the glorious “what-the-hell-is-going-on-here?” absurdity.

      Performa 21 takes place October 12–31, at various venues throughout New York City and online.
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      See How a New Generation of Ceramic Artists Is Pushing the Medium Into Strange Dimensions in Jeffrey Deitch’s ‘Clay Pop’

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      From the opalescent glazes of the self-proclaimed Mad Potter of Biloxi George Ohr to the art collective Gelitin’s simulation of sex with raw clay, ceramics have long been a site of avant-garde experimentation. Now, “Clay Pop,” a group show curated by Alia Williams at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, follows a cohort of artists pushing the medium forward in strange, wonderful new directions.
      For the 36 artists included in the show, “the range of influences encompasses vernacular commercial imagery and artistic sources from African American assemblage to Walt Disney,” and everything in between, according to a statement from the gallery.
      Seth Bogart’s How to Get Rid of Pimples, Valley of the Dolls, Hollywood Babylon, and DRUGS (all 2021). Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.
      Many of the works on view seem to recreate everyday objects, but if done by a mad scientist. Seth Bogard’s ceramics take the shape of well-loved paperbacks with lightly tattered dog-eared pages.
      Then there’s Sally Saul’s forlorn-looking woman who’s a little rough around the edges. It reminds us of real life, but messier, and more fun to look at.
      “Clay Pop,” curated by Alia Williams, is on view at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, through October 30. See more pictures from the show below.
      Masato Mori, Bamboo Dance (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.
      Installation view, “Clay Pop” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
      Rubi Neri, Clay Pop (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Installation view, “Clay Pop” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
      Installation view, “Clay Pop” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
      Installation view, “Clay Pop” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
      Genesis Belanger, Good Guy (2021) [detail]. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Jessica Stoller, Untitled (embrace) (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Heidi Lau, Play I and Play II (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Devin B. Johnson, Adornment V (In which it was grown over), (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Untitled (2020). Courtesy the artist and kaufmann repetto.
      Melvino Garetti, It’s Only a Matter of Time…I Haven’t Whipped Any Ass Around Here (2020). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Seth Bogard, Valley of the Dolls (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Sharif Farrag, Big Dog (Guardian), (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Katie Stout, Frog Rider (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Bari Ziperstein, Farm Labor: Handwork + Technology (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
      Sally Saul, Thinking Things Over (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
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      ‘Greater New York,’ MoMA PS1’s Closely Watched Survey, Returns to Excavate New York’s Past and Reckon With Its Surreal Present

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      In the later category, she pointed to the work of photographer Marilyn Nance, famous for her work documenting African-American life and the African diaspora in New York (and beyond, though the works in this show are focused on New York City), as well as Hiram Maristany who grew up in East Harlem and regularly documented the lives of the close-knit Puerto Rican community.
      Works by Hiram Maristany in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Maristany was the official photographer of the activist group known as the Young Lords, Katrib noted. In addition to protests where they asserted their rights, the Lords were also involved in activities to support the East Harlem community, including organizing clothing drives and picking up trash.
      Katrib pointed to a more contemporary documentary impulse in the work of Black Mass Publishing, a collective established in 2018. The group publishes zines and books of both new and archival content by Black artists aimed at fostering new conversations about Black cultural production.
      Installation view of gallery devoted to Blackmass Publishing in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      In “Greater New York,’ one gallery, dubbed “Black Mass Publishing Study Hall,” features a library of zines and pamphlets to peruse.
      Another work that seems to encapsulate New York City’s former gritty downtown days is the video of poet Diane Burns. Standing in front of trash and rubble-strewn empty lots, against a backdrop of ghostly tenement buildings, Burns is captured reciting her poem, Alphabet City Serenade, her voice looping in the galleries.
      Video of Diane Burns, Poetry Spots: Diane Burns reads ‘Alphabet City Serenade’ (1989) in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Burns, who was born in Kansas to a Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mother, ruminates on “Loisada” versus her life back home. “Hey man, can you spare a cigarette? Do you know of a place to sublet?,” she riffs.
      Katrib pointed to Japanese-American artist Yuji Agematsu as using a mixture of both documentary and surrealism to convey his experience. zip:01.01.20 . . .12:31.20 (2020) is a massive but delicate wall-length work composed of a series of vitrines.
      One of the cases from Yuji Agematsu, zip:01.01.20 . . .12:31.20 (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Inside each is a “calendar” with individual days portrayed as intact cellophane cigarette wrappers that serve as containers for the debris the artist gathered and placed in them on a particular day—chewed gum, bottle caps, scraps of paper—after having gathered them from the streets of New York.
      “It’s like this calendar archive document, but it’s also very surreal and abstract,” says Katrib.
      Works by G. Peter Jemison in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      The show has a focus on issues related to indigeneity. You see this, for instance, in the work of G. Peter Jemison, an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. But it is also international in scope, incorporating the work of artists from Brazil, Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt, often touching on issues of attempted integration and feelings of estrangement.
      The curatorial team also includes writer and curator Serubiri Moses, MoMA PS1 director Kate Fowle, and MoMA Latin American art curator Inés Katzenstein. After more than a year of lockdown and organizing—including Zoom studio visits with artists who were just minutes away—the show they have produced feels both timely and on point.
      “The situation we’re in now is really just underscoring and underlining the things that artists were already dealing with,” says Katrib. “I think one of the biggest challenges was just the isolation, especially for the older generation of artists who were more at risk. We really wanted to respect and honor that New York is a city where different generations of artists can be together and support one another.”
      “Greater New York” is on view at MoMA PS1 in New York through April 18, 2022. More

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      Exhibitors at a Fair in Dubai Have Covered Up the Private Parts of Michelangelo’s ‘David,’ Fearing It Might Offend Visitors

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      A 3D-printed copy of Michelangelo’s David is at the nexus of controversy in Dubai, where exhibitors have obscured the figure’s genitals for fear that it might offend Islamic traditionalists. 
      The 17-foot-tall sculpture, thought to be the most accurate facsimile of the Renaissance masterpiece ever made, spans two stories of a rotunda in the Italian pavilion at Expo 2020, which opened October 1 in the Dubai South district. Visitors can glimpse David’s top quarter, shoulders to head, from the upper floor, but his lower half, encased in glass, can only be viewed from the first floor—an area closed to the public. A concrete slab, meanwhile, effectively obscures the figure’s pelvic region. 
      Davide Rampello, the pavilion’s artistic director, refused to call the gesture censorship, saying instead that the goal was to position the statue as a witness to the “theater of memory,” according to Corriere della Sera. It has to do with the pavilion’s curatorial conceit, a reflection on how our collective memories are being displaced by our increasing reliance on technology. 
      A view from the Italian pavilion of Expo 2020, with the bottom half of the David replica. © Massimo Sestini.
      “Michelangelo knew that without memory there can be neither science nor art,” Rampello told the paper. “Without memory, man loses the ability to tell the world. Here, this is a copy of the David to testify to that memory.”
      “There have been no government censorships,” he added. “This staging is reproduced here as it might have been in Japan or Germany or anywhere else in the world.”
      But others who worked on the project have been more candid about the practical concerns of exhibiting a naked statue in a heavily Islamic region such as the United Arab Emirates.  
      “We even thought of putting underwear on the statue, or changing it altogether,” an exhibition staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Italian newspaper La Repubblica. “We understood too late that it was an error to bring a statue of a nude man to the Emirates.”

      When reached for comment, representatives for the Italian pavilion explained that the display of the David duplicate is “functional, to allow visitors looking at the statue from the first floor of the Pavilion to see [it] at eye level.” That, Rampello explained, “is a totally different and more introspective perspective than the one tourists in Florence are used to enjoying when visiting the original.”
      Regardless of the intention, the move has sparked hot takes aplenty online. Italian art historian Vittorio Sgarbi, for one, called the pavilion organizers’ “deference to the Islamic tradition” an “unprecedented, unacceptable, intolerable humiliation.”
      The pavilion is part of Expo 2020, an international fair featuring dedicated presentations from more than 100 countries and organizations. Delayed by a year due to the pandemic, it is the first World Expo edition to be held in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia region and remains on view through March 31, 2022. The replica of David was constructed from acrylic resin based on 3D scans of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, carved between 1501 and 1504 and now permanently on view in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia.
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      Documenta 15 Unveils Its Artist List for 2022, Including Jimmie Durham, Dan Perjovschi, and Lots of Collectives

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      If you were lucky and happened to be at the right newspaper vendor in Germany on Friday, October 1, you might have picked up a copy of Asphalt—a publication that is sold to benefit poor and people struggling with homelessness. Within its pages, the art collective ruangrupa announced their artist list for the 2022 edition of Documenta.
      The Indonesian group has named 51 artists or collectives who will participate in the show that is set to take open on June 18, 2022. More names may be added later. The street paper will be the official media partner for the major quinquennial exhibition. It is available by mail or email subscription.
      Participants have been broken off into smaller groups, called “mini-majelis,” (majelis is the Indonesian word for council) and Asphalt reports that they have already begun working together. Ruangrupa will not comment about the details on the participants and organization structure until next week.
      Left to right: Iswanto Hartono, Daniella Fitriap and Reza Afisina from the artist collective ruangrupa in front of the ruruHaus in the October issue of Asphalt with the complete artist list of the exhibiting artists of documenta. (Photo by Uwe Zucchi/picture alliance via Getty Images)
      In the announcement, the nationalities of the participants are not mentioned—only their local time zone. Johannesburg’s Keleketla! Library, Nairobi-based Nest Collective, and Jimmie Durham are among those listed.
      Tickets are now on sale for the exhibition. For the first time, one can also buy a “solidarity ticket” that can be retrieved by another person as a free ticket.
      In 2019, Ruangrupa announced their concept for the exhibition would be lumbung, which is the Indonesian word for rice barn, a storage site for communally-produced rice. The collective has also announced several venues which are being used for the first time during the 2022 show, including the former site of a transport engineering company and Hallenbad Ost, a former Bauhaus-designed indoor pool.
      The October issue of the street newspaper Asphalt, opened to the page with the complete artist list of the exhibiting artists of documenta 15. (Photo by Uwe Zucchi/picture alliance via Getty Images)
      Here is the current artist list, apparently organized by “mini-majeli,” listed with the individual time zones they work in:
      ikkibawiKrrr (KST)ook_reinaart vanhoe (CET)Richard Bell (AEST)Taring Padi (WIB) Wakaliwood (EAT)
      Arts Collaboratory (diverse Zeitzonen)Black Quantum Futurism (EST)Chimurenga (SAST)Jumana Emil Abboud (EET)Nino Bulling (CET)Agus Nur Amal PMTOH (WIB)Subversive Film (CET, EET)
      Cinema Caravan und Takashi Kuribayashi (JS)Kiri Dalena (PHT)Nguyen Trinh Thi (ICT)Safdar Ahmed (AEST)Sakuliu (TST)
      Atis Rezistans / Ghetto Biennale (EST,WET)Marwa Arsanios (CET)Sourabh Phadke (WET,IST)Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh (BT,WT)*foundationClass* collective (CET)
      Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) (WAT,CAT,EAT)Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie (WAT)Asia Art Archive (HKT)Centre d’art Waza (CAT)El Warcha (WAT)Graziela Kunsch (BRT)Keleketla! Library (SAST)Komîna Fîlm a Rojava (EET)Sada (regroup) (AST)Siwa plateforme – L’Economat at Redeyef (WAT)The Black Archives (CET)
      Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture (ICT)Dan Perjovschi (EET)Fehras Publishing Practices (CET)Nhà Sàn Collective (ICT)The Nest Collective (EAT)
      Hamja Ahsan (WET)Jimmie Durham (CET)La Intermundial Holobiente (WET,ART,EST)Pinar Öğrenci’ (CET)Saodat Ismailova (UZT)
      Amol K Patil (IST)BOLOHO (CST)Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun (CST)CHANG En-man (TSTSa Sa Art Projects (ICT)
      Alice Yard (AST)Erick Beltrán (CET)LE 18 (WAT)MADEYOULOOK (SAST)Party Office b2b Fadescha (IST,EST)Serigrafistas queer (ART)
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      Five Artist-Collective Nominees Go Beyond Empty Talk to Deliver Acts of Solidarity in Turner Prize Exhibition

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      For all the criticisms of stodginess, it is a testament to the ongoing cultural significance of the Turner Prize—the U.K.’s most prestigious contemporary-art honor—that it continues to incite passionate analysis from aficionados and naysayers alike. Though historically a controversial event, recent years have seen increased fervor for upending the familiar formula, usually in the name of today’s most popular buzzword: “solidarity.” 
      For instance, the 2019 finalists—Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani—famously both shunned and welcomed the award with their joint acceptance of the prize, made as a “statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity, and solidarity.” 
      Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, U.K., this year’s Turner Prize exhibition venue. © Garry Jones Photography.
      In May 2020, Tate Britain doled out ten individual artists’ bursaries in lieu of a single winner and the customary group exhibition. Again, the lofty goal was to “help support a larger selection of artists through this period of profound disruption and uncertainty,” as Tate Britain announced in a press release. 
      Now, in 2021, this turn toward the utopian continues, with this year’s iteration marking the first time the Turner Prize jury selected a shortlist consisting solely of artist collectives. Tate Britain has said that the nominees—Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.), Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works—“reflect the solidarity and community demonstrated in response to the pandemic.”
      Installation view of work by Gentle/Radical in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Garry Jones.
      Indeed, the fabric of all five collectives’ practices consists of various threads of social activism woven together through film, painting, installation, or sound. But the decision sparked backlash, with a chorus of think pieces (in ArtReview, Frieze, and elsewhere) lamenting the character of the 2021 Turner Prize. Nominee B.O.S.S. actually issued its own statement denouncing the Tate’s allegedly superficial commitment to social issues.
      Installation view of work by Gentle/Radical in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
      All of this preemptive brouhaha has finally culminated with the official opening of the Turner Prize exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, the U.K.’s 2021 City of Culture. The five collectives’ presentations stretch across four individual galleries, with the Welsh entrant, Gentle/Radical, serving as the curtain-raiser in an introductory space removed from its nominated peers. The community activists—not all made up of traditional artists—present a series of flags alongside a projection focused around Gorsedd bardic prayers, in a defiant post-colonial reclamation of Welsh culture.
      Installation view of work by Cooking Sections in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Doug Peters/PA Wire.
      Elsewhere, the ultra-hot Cooking Sections, who just closed a stellar solo show at Tate Britain, somewhat lazily relies upon a reheat of that recent exhibition, once again examining the effects of salmon farming. Since this duo is concerned with how our food consumption impacts the climate emergency, why not shed light upon a new aspect of that complex and enormous issue, given the opportunity of this highly visible platform?
      Installation view of work by B.O.S.S. in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
      B.O.S.S. offers a dark room sparsely outfitted with a stark set of speakers paired with flowing banners animated by household fans placed on the floor beneath, all capped off with a black obsidian sphere on a plinth. A streamer announces that “Sound is the only system,” which comes across as a half-baked declaration: despite the conviction with which it is declared, the statement’s zeal is rendered moot by the absence of precise meaning. (If the installation underwhelms, it should be noted that B.O.S.S.’s public criticism also addressed the lack of adequate time for the group to prepare for the exhibition.)
      Installation view of work by Project Art Works in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Doug Peters/PA Wire.
      Project Art Works, hailing from Hastings, restages a “typical” artist’s studio. Their intervention initially appears to be an ordinary creative space, with framed works hung on white walls. Yet the gallery’s conventional white-cube feel is interrupted by a smaller enclave, installed smack-dab in the center of the room, that houses an archive of over 4,000 works by neurodivergent artists. Project Art Work’s accomplishment is rooted in this sleight of hand, disarming the audience with the slick banality of the initial setting, which amplifies the revelation that neurodiverse creators are responsible for all of the art on view—thus making it clear that greater visibility and acceptance for such “disabilities” benefits culture at large.
      Installation view of Project Art Works in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Garry Jones.
      Last but not least, the Belfast-based Array Collective, which focuses on social issues affecting Northern Ireland—including abortion rights, queer visibility, mental health, and gentrification—has created a makeshift pub which takes up the majority of their allotted gallery space in an installation that stands head and shoulders above their fellow nominees.
      The colloquial “pub” dates back to 1859, a slang shortening of “public house.” Though that fact is not explicitly referenced in the exhibition text, the idea of a location built solely as a space for a community to come together looms large here. A three-channel video work is mounted on the far wall, with members of marginalized communities relating mythological stories with knee-slapping barroom humor. I was moved to tears by one portion describing LGBTQ+ persons living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Despite the horror of that history, tales of “Catholic fairies” and “Protestant fairies” who managed to actively identify and recover a sense of love, kindness, and community provided the most powerful moment during this year’s remarkable Turner Prize exhibition.
      Installation view of work by Array Collective in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
      Pitting socially-minded activist collectives against each other could be perceived as a contest of moral superiority, particularly when staged during a moment in which use of the term “solidarity” has become near-meaningless in its ubiquity. But even if the concept of solidarity seems saccharine—and even arguably outdated at this point—the Turner Prize jury correctly identified the pulse of current art-making. By that measure, this is a successful exhibition. It should appeal not only to those interested in contemporary art, but also to those with a stake in discourses propelling critical change in society today.
      “Turner Prize 2021” is on view at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, U.K., September 29, 2021–January 12, 2022.
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      in Exhibitions

      It’s on Us to Queer the Metaverse: A Digitally Savvy Athens Biennale Tackles the Promises and Pitfalls of Web 3.0

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      Of the many era-defining societal shifts and inequities that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into focus and accelerated, the change in the ways we use and navigate the metaverse are perhaps the least widely recognized and understood. Our dependence on the virtual realm seemed to swell overnight, as those who could moved their work to online rooms, minted NFTs, traded cryptocurrencies, and sent their avatars gaming with like-minded strangers. Only now are we realizing that this version of Web 3.0 being created has the potential to be as grim as the current moment in our physical world: For one, right-wing extremists recruiting and organizing in online quest games has very concrete ramifications in real life.
      In his nine-part Metaverse Primer, updated in June 2021 in response to the effects of the pandemic, venture capitalist and former head of strategy for Amazon Matthew Ball offers this definition: “The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3-D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.” Or, to put it in simpler terms, “No one really expected the next generation of the internet would come from mobile gaming, and yet here we are.” That some of the most in-depth writing about this new reality comes from a venture capitalist says it all.
      Nektarios Pappas performing The Last Judgement–Reloaded at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Emilios Charalambous.
      “ECLIPSE,” the 7th Athens Biennale (AB7), cocurated by Ghanaian-American curator Larry Ossei-Mensah and Omsk Social Club—a Berlin-based group whose practice is anchored in speculative role-play gaming—under the artistic direction of Poka-Yio, homes in on questions surrounding the utopian promise of Web 3.0. It is up to us, this divergent curatorial team argues, to lay claim, create, meet, build, and thrive in those digital realms. It’s on us to queer the Metaverse.
      Fittingly, the list of participating artists includes many individuals and collectives working under pseudonyms and exploring the possibilities of digital practices. Afro-Hungarian artist Huntrezz Janos delivered a digital performance titled Eclipsatrix Exuvia during the biennial’s opening weekend, her bejeweled, chimeric avatar twerking and spinning on a screen inside one of the exhibition’s venues, a former department store. Nascent, a Berlin-based duo founded in 2018, is showing a multipart work titled Temporal Secessionism.  A series of digital clocks installed on all floors of the abandoned store, the work keeps track of three different time-measuring systems: one is based on real-time Bitcoin transactions; one shows the consensus of time that syncs all online servers; and another, dubbed “healing time,” moves according to the frequency of broken quartz, the crystal used in analog clockwork. On the 3rd floor, the pseudo-company Hypercomf (brainchild of the Greek artists Ioannis Koliopoulos and Paola Palavidi) has set up an office environment, replete with ergonomic chairs, branded mugs, and indoor plants, and desks made of pressed plastic waste. Some of these elements are coated with organic matter to enable mycelium growth, possibly inviting strands capable of decomposing plastics. Mycelium also happens to be the name of a popular Bitcoin wallet.
      Claude Eigan, Inner Saboteur II (2019), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Emilios Charalambous.
      Despite its digital-savvy focus, AB7 also raises issues concerning our fragile physical existence and the class and racial inequalities affecting it. The approach, however, is to address and activate viewers’ tacit and embodied knowledge, rather than beating them over the head with identity politics: the messages are communicated not discursively but instead appeal to viewers’ intuitions surrounding social hierarchies and racial divides. It’s portraiture in lieu of manifestos.
      In fact, there is a dazzling amount of photography on view by artists who consider, claim, and reimagine the ways in which to represent nonconforming, disobedient, or other-ed bodies. A series of portraits of members of South-Africa’s LGBTQ community by Zanele Muholi is stunningly straightforward; Kayode Ojo’s glossy portraits are jarring in their rejection of representational tropes, a rallying cry to turn our (luscious, warm) backs on excessive consumerism in favor of a celebration of the unbranded self. Awol Erizku’s still lifes, populated with signifiers of Black culture, are blown up to cover entire walls in what used to be the department store’s sports section.
      Andrew Roberts, RHYTHM RATTLESNAKE: The world ends with you, baby centipede (2020), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
      There are numerous soundscapes and sound installations by artists, including Moor Mother, whose activist spoken-word and protest poetry, which deals with intersectional feminism, inherited trauma, and systemic racism, resonate through the main venue. An installation by the Belgian composer and artist Billy Bultheel, commissioned for AB7, fills the basement of the former Santaroza Courthouse in Dikaiosinis (or Justice) Square, which stood empty for 30 years. The biennial’s organizers initiated the building’s reopening to the public, as well as the cleanup of the small green lung—so scarce in Athens—that the square provides between two main thoroughfares.
      Labor and exhaustion was one of the curators’ considerations, too, often implied via its actual remedy—an invitation to take a seat. A series of upcycled chairs made at an Athens workshop, commissioned by London-based designer Yinka Ilori as part of his program for people in addiction recovery, greets viewers on the department store’s first floor. (Ilori was enlisted to design ONX Studio in Athens, the Onassis Foundation’s new extended-reality center, slated to open in 2022). On the upper level, fantastical animal-headed furniture by Nuri Koerfer invites viewers to pause and sit on the sculptural works.
      Ayesha Tan Jones performing The New Elementals at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
      In the biennial’s third venue, an abandoned office building, Miles Greenberg, who’s the youngest artist on view at 22, enthralls with the video work Late October (2021). A protégé of Marina Abramović, Greenberg edited footage from a seven-hour durational performance he staged Paris last year, in which seven Black performers (including himself), each representing a figure from Greek mythology, perch atop slowly revolving plinths. Treating the body as sculptural material, the 20-minute piece speaks of the erosion of both artifacts and empires.
      Cajsa von Zeipel, Formula X (2020), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery. Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
      But perhaps no other work captures the oscillation between the two realms we have come to create and exist in than Formula X (2021), a sculpture in silicone, rubber, and steel by Swedish artist Cajsa von Zeipel. Like a Mad Max: Fury Road amazon of the metaverse, a hyper-human pregnant figure is steering a three-wheel ATV into the unknown. Her bags are packed with diapers for her first baby and soon-to-be born second, and treats for her two dogs in tow, everything strapped onto her body or the vehicle with leather and rubber biker gear. The work’s dimensions are larger than life-size, just like the expectations and strain put on single mothers, not only during pandemic lockdowns. She is fierce and in control as she rides over sushi, which lodges between the tracks of the wheels. Or is this a projected avatar emerging from a deeply exhausted human existence?
      The seventh Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE,” is on view at various venues throughout the city, September 24–November 28, 2021.
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      How the Fondation Louis Vuitton and an Army of Conservators Persuaded Russia to Green Light a Landmark Exhibition of Modern Art

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      Russian brothers Mikhail and Ivan Morozov amassed one of the world’s strongest collections of Impressionist and Modern Art. But their world-leading collection was nationalized in 1918 after the Bolshevik revolution, and fell into obscurity for decades.
      Now, for its exhibition, “The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art,” on view through February 22, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris has reunited around 200 artworks from the collection, which is now mostly dispersed between the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The works by Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Bonnard come from the first two museums, the works by Russian artists from the latter.
      “Reuniting all these pieces from major collections was very complicated and an enormous diplomatic undertaking,” Anne Baldassari, the exhibition’s curator, told Artnet News. The diplomatic significance was evident at the opening, which was attended by French President Emmanuel Macron and the Russian culture minister, Olga Lioubimova.
      Installation view of “La Collection Morozov. Icônes de l’art moderne,” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage.
      The feat of showing the Morozov collection outside Russia for the first time is a “landmark” event, said LVMH’s president, and art collector Bernard Arnault. It was achieved partly thanks to the Fondation Louis Vuitton helping the Russian museums restore works by some of the artists and being involved in organizing the Morozov exhibition at the Hermitage in 2019.
      This is the second exhibition at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton that Baldassari has curated on major Moscow collectors—the first was devoted to Sergei Shchukin in 2016 and 2017. “[Had their collections not been seized during the Bolshevik revolution] Shchukin and Ivan Morozov had the idea of joining their collections to create a big museum, which would have constituted the most extraordinary museum on French art in the world,” Baldassari said.
      The history of the Morozov collection is a family saga. Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, born in 1870 and 1871 respectively, were the great-grandsons of a serf. With five rubles from his wife’s dowry, their ancestor set up a ribbon workshop, which developed into a factory, and bought his family’s freedom. In a few generations, the family—who were Old Believers (opposed to reforming the Russian Orthodox Church)–became wealthy, philanthropic industrialists. The first room in the exhibition features paintings of their circle by leading Russian artists of that era, such as Mikhail Vrubel and Valentin Serov.
      Auguste Renoir, Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary, Paris (1877).Coll. Ivan Morozov, 26 November 1904. Musée d’Etat des beaux-arts Pouchkine, Moscou / Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
      At the turn of the last century in Russia, the upper social echelon spoke French and the Morozov brothers formed their stupendous collection on the advice of Parisian dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard. Mikhail, who died prematurely at the age of 33, discovered Bonnard’s work in Paris and acquired the first paintings by Gauguin to enter Russia. His brother later commissioned Bonnard to decorate the main staircase of his mansion. Ivan Morozov adored the work of Cézanne—indeed, having tried their hand at landscape painting in their youth, the brothers felt affinity for the landscape genre—and acquired 18 works by him.
      Black-and-white photographs displayed at Fondation Louis Vuitton give a sense of the splendor of Ivan Morozov’s mansion and its painting galleries. Some were taken by Maurice Denis, who was commissioned by Ivan Morozov to paint large panels on the story of Psyche for his music room, which has been restaged in the exhibition.
      After the Morozov collection was nationalized in 1918, Ivan Morozov fled to Finland and died in Karlsbad, Germany, at the age of 49. The collection would form part of the Museum on Modern Western Art, which Stalin ordered to be closed in 1948, dispersing its contents between the Pushkin and the Hermitage. The Soviet state sold several works for economic reasons, including Van Gogh’s Café de Nuit (now in the Yale University collection) and Cézanne’s portrait of Madame Cézanne (now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum). But things could have been worse. “Stalin hated [Western] art and could have asked for its destruction,” Baldassari said of the danger posed to the collection.
      The curator began researching the Morozovs by traveling to Russia and studying the archives in 2014. Several works, including a painting by Gauguin, that had “suffered in storage” were restored with support of French expertise and high-tech equipment. Others will require more elaborate restoration techniques in order not to risk damaging them. “Some of Van Gogh’s marvelous works couldn’t come—such as the only painting that Van Gogh sold in his life-time, Red vineyard in Arles,” Baldassari said. “Ivan Morozov purchased it from a young Belgian artist who had bought it from Van Gogh.”
      Vincent Van Gogh, The Prison Courtyard, Saint-Rémy (1890). Coll. Ivan Morozov, 23 October 1909. Musée d’Etat des beaux-arts Pouchkine, Moscou / Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
      However, Van Gogh’s The Prison Courtyard (1890), which he made while in the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence psychiatric hospital, has made it to Paris. The artist’s brother Theo had sent him a photograph of Gustave Doré’s drawing of a London prison’s courtyard which Van Gogh reinterpreted into a primarily greenish blue-hued painting, the conditions of the prisoners echoing his own confinement.
      Further highlights include Matisse’s Moroccan Triptych (1912-1913) in rich blues, comprising a view from a window, a portrait of a young girl and an entrance to the Kasbah; Gauguin’s lush paintings of Tahiti; Picasso’s Cubist portrait of Vollard, the face dissolving into geometric shapes; Monet’s misty depiction of Waterloo Bridge, and Serov’s striking portraits of the Morozov brothers. What’s also fascinating is how a group of Russian avant-garde artists, the Cézannistes, were ardent followers of Cézanne.
      Lifting the veil on this chapter of Russian history “is only at the beginning,” Baldassari says. “Now we need to go back to the [Russian] avant-gardes; there are a lot of points that remain obscure and more research needs to be carried out in Russian museums. What we’ve done on the Shchukin and Morozov collections is like lifting an enormous block; perhaps now more things will be able to come out.”
      “The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art” is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through February 22, 2022.
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