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    Get an Exclusive Look at the Totally Wacky NFTs Urs Fischer Is About to Sell Through Pace (And Do Your Best to Make Sense of Them)

    Next week, half a dozen newly minted NFTs by artist Urs Fischer will go on view in a digital exhibition hosted by Pace, another step in the gallery’s full-fledged commitment to crypto-art.  
    The show, presented in collaboration with the Loïc Gouzer-founded Fair Warning auction app and the digital market platform MakersPlace, will live on Pace’s website. 
    Each of Fisher’s NFTs features two quotidian objects floating in a blank white space like a trippy screensaver, constantly converging with one another to form Frankensteinian compound-sculptures: a broccoli stalk bisecting a green sponge, a showerhead merging with a red Nike shoe. Weird stuff. 
    The works belong to “CHAOS,” a larger series of 501 NFTs produced by the Swiss artist.
    For buyers, each piece comes with a reference rendering, access to the raw data behind the visuals, and instructions for how to exhibit it.
    “The individual objects selected for ‘CHAOS’ are engineered, cultured, or manufactured by humans and sourced from the physical world and transformed into a 3D digital model through 3D scanning,” the project’s website explains. They’ll be offered up for $50,000 a pop, according to the gallery. 
    The artist will offset the carbon emissions involved in the minting of each work through a partnership with the nonprofit Conservation International. 
    Urs Fischer, CHAOS #23 Splendor (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
    Fischer debuted “CHAOS” in April when he partnered with Pace to sell the first entry in the series, CHAOS #1 Human, which depicts a lighter colliding with an egg.
    The work sold through Fair Warning for $97,700. (The collaboration reportedly caused a rift between the artist and his longtime dealer, Gagosian.) Pace did not disclose the prices for the new NFTs.
    The first 500 “CHAOS” works will be unveiled over the course of several months. After that, a capstone 501st artwork, composed of all the objects in the pieces that came before it, will be minted. 
    Among mega-galleries, Pace has been perhaps the most ardent embracer of the crypto art wave. Earlier this month, the gallery announced that it would accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment for all artworks, physical or digital. And in September, it will launch its own dedicated platform for selling artists’ NFTs.
    See more examples from Fisher’s upcoming show below.
    Urs Fischer, CHAOS #20 Sashay (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
    Urs Fischer, CHAOS #22 Simulacrum (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
    Urs Fischer, CHAOS #24 Analysand (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
    Urs Fischer, CHAOS #25 Gratis (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
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    The Golden Lion-Winning Climate Opera ‘Sea & Sun’ Is Going on a World Tour, Starting With Berlin and New York

    Lithuania’s Golden Lion-winning performance at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which drew snaking lines around the pavilion, is going on a world tour.
    Sun & Sea (Marina), a poignant live performance that sees opera singers and volunteers sing songs that address our delicate relationship to the planet, will travel to the U.S. after its showing in Berlin this weekend.
    The performance will premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from September 15 to 26. (Tickets go on sale July 27.) After its New York run, the production will tour Arcadia Exhibitions in Philadelphia, the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, ARTnews reported. (Dates beyond New York have yet to be confirmed.)
    The collaboration between Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytėm, struck a chord with the public as they looked down from a balcony to watch performers stretch out on an artificially sandy beach, bake in fake lights, and sing harmonies about their mundane existences, which the pavilion’s curator Lucia Pietroiusti described as “songs of worry and of boredom, songs of almost nothing.”
    Only slowly does the reality of climate change set in for the viewer, as a wealthy mother brags about seeing the “bleached, pallid whiteness” of the Great Barrier Reef and a young man complains that it did not snow on Christmas, and instead “felt like it could be Easter.”
    Co-Artistic Directors, Helen Turner and Pablo Wendel with their dog Coal in the Bauhaus swimming hall, which will be the location of the Sea & Sun performances in Berlin this weekend. © Lukas Korschan for The FACE.
    The performance is likely to resonate even more after the pandemic, a time when our anxieties about natural calamities reached a fever pitch and immersive performances were impossible to stage.
    The Berlin chapter, set to take place July 17 and July 18 at an abandoned Bauhaus swimming pool outside of Berlin, sold out in two days. (Walk-ins may be accommodated, organizers say, but there are no guarantees.)
    “It’s been two years in the making, and after four postponements, it’s completely surreal that its finally happening,” said Helen Turner, the director of E-Werk Luckenwalde, which is organizing the event. “The piece is powerful, especially in the location we have, an abandoned swimming hall, which speaks to ecological catastrophe and increasing feelings of fragility and vulnerability.”
    While 5,000 people normally would have been able to attend, social-distancing restrictions will limit that number to 1,500. Masks must be worn on site.
    The performance is well-suited to the E-Werk location—an arts center that doubles as an electrical power station, fueling both the surrounding area and its own art projects.
    But even with clean energy, the production is… quite the production. For just two days, it cost €130,000 (around $153,500) to get off the ground, according to Turner, and involved 60 performers and cultural workers (not to mention tons of sand, which was carted in from nearby). Organizers in Venice estimated the original version cost $3 a minute to stage.
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    Alex Harsley Spent a Half Century Championing Other Photographers. Now, at 83, the Art World’s Gaze Has Finally Turned to Him

    Alex Harsley’s new exhibition, a survey of his more than six-decade photography career at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, is a big deal. In terms of scope, it’s likely the biggest of his life. And yet, the octogenarian artist isn’t exactly taking a victory lap. 
    “I’ve moved far beyond that stuff,” he says, referring to the retrospective nature of the show, which includes New York street photos, arty portraits, and experiments in video from the 1950s through to today. “I’m into a whole different area [in terms of] exhibiting now.”
    We‘re sitting inside the 4th Street Photo Gallery, a cramped storefront space in the East Village overstuffed with old cameras, darkroom gear, and prints—thousands of prints, all lining the walls and stacked in piles of indeterminate age (they might be load-bearing at this point). Harsley has occupied the space for 48 years. 
    “This,” he says, gesturing to the space around him, “this is like an installation.”
    Indeed, 4th Street is like a living, breathing artwork. What has historically been an exhibition space for up-and-coming photographers is, today, more like Harsley’s personal office or studio. At almost all waking hours of the day you can find him in there working—scanning slides, editing photos, hanging and rehanging his work. At 83, his days of roaming the streets of New York with a camera in hand are mostly over, but he has scores of archives still to work through. 
    “Alex is really unsentimental about his own work,” said Vivian Chui, Pioneer Works’s director of exhibitions who co-curated the show with Harsley’s daughter, Kendra Krueger. “He really just wants to make images. He’s not thinking about his legacy, he’s not thinking about where his work was. He’s always much more focused on where his work is going.”
    Alex Harsley, Nite Meetings. Courtesy of the artist.
    Harsley was born outside of Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1938, and grew up on a rural cotton farm. Only one or twice a month did he see a car or electricity, he recalled. That is, until age 10, when he moved with his mother to New York. 
    Following a stint in the army in his late teens, Harsley moved back to the city, bought his first camera, and learned his way around the darkroom while working as a staff photographer at the district attorney’s office. Then the young photographer was off: churning out 35mm pictures of New York’s faces and places; capturing activists, athletes, and musicians in action.
    In 1971—half a century ago this year—Harsley founded Minority Photographers Inc., an artist-run non-profit based in his apartment that showed the work of up-and-coming image-makers. Two years later came the group’s headquarters: a derelict street-level space offered by the city on the cheap, thanks to Minority Photographers’ 501c3 status. That was the birth of 4th Street Photo. It’s the same space Harsely’s sitting in today. 
    Alex Harsley, Playing In Chinatown (1970). Courtesy of the artist.
    So out of place in the now hyper-gentrified neighborhood is 4th Street that it’s easy to walk past the spot and not even see it, the way you would a travel agency or a phone booth or other neighborhood vestige. And yet, Harsley still gets his fair share of walk-ins coming to look at his work; many even buy it. During our interview, a mother dressed in athleisure came in to pick up a couple of prints for her college-age daughter, who had just moved to the neighborhood. I asked if they’d seen the show at Pioneer Works. They said they had no idea how to get to Brooklyn.  
    For Harsley, an artist largely ignored by museums and galleries in his career, passersby looking to purchase a piece of New York history are his clients. And he’s okay with that. “It’s not about me and my name,” he said. “It’s about the content. So I like to stay behind the [work].”
    But that’s not to say the photographer doesn’t have fans in the art world. If off-the-street visitors are one-half of Harsley’s collector base, then the other half is fellow artists, many of whom were affiliated at some point with 4th Street Photo or Minority Photographers.
    Alex Harsley, Cousins (1980). Courtesy of the artist.
    For generations of up-and-coming photographers in the 1970s through the turn of the century, 4th Street was a site of community, mentorship, and—perhaps most importantly—wall space. Among those who have shown in the gallery are Dawoud Bey, David Hammons, Eli Reed, and Andres Serrano, while others known to have frequented the space include Robert Frank, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Cynthia MacAdams. 
    Harsley, for his part, has stories about all of them—and he’d surely be happy to share them should you stop by. (Bey was a “serious hustler,” he said with admiration; Frank “sold his soul to the devil.”) But listen in and you may detect a latent tinge of bitterness, too. It’s the chip on the shoulder speaking: success never came to Harsley the way it did those heavyweights, even though he considered himself a mentor to many of them. 
    “When I started Minority Photographers, I had to leave myself behind. I worked very hard at helping other people become successful,” he said. “But in the course of all of that I had to sacrifice my own interests.”
    The mood hung heavy for a second, before Harsley lit it up with a joke: “If I had known I was going to be in the same place [50 years later], I would’ve said, ‘Let’s do something else!’” 
    Alex Harsley, Fashion Shoot (1972). Courtesy of the artist.
    “I don’t know if I believe that,” Chui said when I recalled this comment to her. It’s not that Harsley forfeited a great legacy in the name of 4th Street and Minority Photographers; those projects are his legacy. “The nonprofit and the gallery were so special,” she said, “it’s hard to imagine him having not done that.”
    “Alex Harsley: The First Light From Darkness” is on view now through August 22, 2021 at Pioneer Works.
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    There’s More to Alma Thomas Than Colorful Abstractions, an Eclectic Show of the Artist’s Marionettes, Still Lifes, and Other Work Proves

    A long overdue retrospective for the late artist Alma Thomas has touched down at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.
    The exhibition, titled “Everything Is Beautiful,” showcases little known aspects of the artist’s life and career, such as her interests in gardening and fashion, and her early student works. It was co-organized with the Columbus Museum in the artist’s hometown of Columbus, Georgia.
    “One of the goals of the show has been to have a Columbus-originated story,” Jonathan Frederick Walz, the Columbus Museum’s curator of American art, told Artnet News. “There seems to be this received wisdom that Thomas only became an artist after she stopped teaching in the classroom in 1960, but the material that we had at the museum made us realize that, in fact, she had been making art all along.”
    “Her late abstractions kind of end up standing for her entire career,” Walz added. “Our project with this show is to show that Thomas was multifaceted.”
    Alma Thomas with students at Howard University Art Gallery (1928 or after). Photo courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
    Born in 1891, Thomas spent the first nearly 16 years of her life in Columbus before her family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1907. After spending several years teaching in Delaware out of high school, she enrolled in Howard University in 1921 and became the first graduate of its art department.
    The earliest painting in the show dates to her college years, likely from 1924. By comparing works from throughout her life, “you can really see how she’s exploring different styles and techniques before she arrives at what she focuses on as her signature style,” said Seth Femen, curator of photography at the Chrysler Museum and co-curator the exhibition.
    Thomas hit upon that style—the colorful dabs of paint arranged in strips and rows—in the mid-1960s.
    Alma Thomas, Blast Off (1970). Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
    “This is a moment where the New York art world is being highly contested by African Americans and other BIPOC folks and women about the lack of representation in New York museums,” Walz said.
    In response, the Whitney began a series of solo shows in a one-room, ground-floor gallery, and Thomas was one of the artists invited to participate.
    It was a watershed moment in her career. “It was so important, since Thomas was the first Black woman to be given a solo show at the Whitney and it’s really where her career skyrockets from that point onward,” Walz said.
    But like so many women artists, Thomas returned to relative obscurity after her death.
    “She and her work just kind of lost currency for quite a long time,” Walz said. “It really wasn’t until 2009, when the Obamas hung the painting Skylight in their private residence apartments in the White House, that suddenly she became a thing again.”
    Despite growing interest in Thomas in the last decade, large swaths of her career have received little attention. In the 1930s, she became deeply interested in marionettes, sculpting figures that she brought in as teaching guides to her classroom at D.C.’s Shaw Jr. High School, where she taught from 1925 to 1960.
    Alma Thomas, Clown Marionette (ca. 1935). Photo courtesy of the Alma Thomas, Wind Dancing with Spring Flowers (1969). Courtesy of the Columbus Museum.
    “Marionettes were a teaching tool that she could use to communicate teaching concepts, but also as the framework of a year-long project where her students learned all different kinds of things—language arts, music, electrical engineering, color theory, history of theater, design,” Walz said. “At the end of the year, the class would produce a version of Alice in Wonderland.”
    The only time a Thomas marionette has been exhibited was at the artist’s posthumous 1981 show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Columbus Museum owns five of them, and is also displaying a large architectural drawing for a collapsible marionette stage.
    Alma Thomas, Sketch for Giant marionette (1935/1938). Courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
    “It is an engineering feat,” Femen said, noting that Thomas had studied draftsmanship at the technical high school she attended. “She’s figuring out how the components will all work together.”
    “That engineering and architectural interest really comes through in the late paintings,” Walz added. “They are very considered. They’re somewhat architectonic. Even though they are nature based, there’s a very significant structure behind them.”
    Of the more than 150 objects on view in the current presentation, about two dozen have never (or only rarely) been in the public eye.
    Alma Thomas, Untitled (1922/1924). Courtesy of the Kinsey Collection, Pacific Palisades, California.
    “You can’t do good scholarship on an artist unless you know the range of material,” Walz said. “The same range was being reproduced over and over and people were saying the same things. By broadening the selection, we are hoping to add texture to how people can understand her and her work.”
    As Thomas neared the end of her teaching career, she began redoubling her efforts in the studio, and took art classes at American University from 1952 to 1957.
    “That’s why, in 1960, she was able to hit the ground running—she didn’t come out of the blue. She was paying her dues all along,” Walz said.
    Alma Thomas, Grassy Melodic Chant (1976). Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
    Thomas remained dedicated to her craft until her death, in 1978.
    “There are works from 1977 that really show her grappling with physical impairments and adapting to them—you can see it in the work,” Femen said. “She reportedly brought materials with her to the hospital when she went in for the surgery that ultimately was the end of her life.”
    See more works from the show below.
    Alma Thomas, Untitled (1968). Courtesy Steve and Lesley Testan/Emily Friedman Fine Art.
    Alma Thomas, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976). Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
    Alma Thomas, Horizon (1974). Courtesy of Henry H. and Carol Brown Goldberg, Bethesda, Maryland.
    Jan van RaayAmerican, Faith Ringgold and Michele Wallace at Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) protest at the Whitney Museum, New York, January 31, 1971. Photo courtesy of Jan van Raay, Portland, Oregon.
    Alma Thomas, Snoopy Sees a Sunrise (1970). Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
    Unidentified youths in theatrical costumes at Howard University (ca. 1927). Photo courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
    Alma Thomas, Babbling Brook and Whistling Poplar Tree Symphony (1976). Courtesy of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
    “Alma Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful” will be on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art, One Memorial Place, Norfolk, Virginia, July 9–October 3, 2021. It will travel to the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St NW,  Washington, D.C., October 30, 2021–January 23, 2022; the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, Nashville, February 25–June 5, 2022; and the Columbus Museum, 1251 Wynnton Road, Columbus, Georgia, July 1, 2022–September 25, 2022. 
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    Sculptor Eva LeWitt’s Colorful Outdoor Installation in Massachusetts Celebrates the Power of Observing Art in Nature—See Images Here

    One of the best parts about summer art exhibitions is that many offer opportunities to spend time outdoors.
    One of the season’s most exciting shows for this kind of escape—to take in beautiful artwork in an even more beautiful setting—is the Clark Institute’s “Ground/work,” which welcomes visitors to the sprawling grounds of the Berkshires-based museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
    The show, the museum notes, highlights “a reverence for nature and a desire to further enliven the surrounding trails, pastures, and woods” of the property, and brings together bold, colorful installations from six contemporary female artists: Kelly Akashi, Nairy Baghramian, Jennie C. Jones, Analia Saban, Haegue Yang, and Eva LeWitt. All of the artists planned their works in response to sites they chose by hand, each of which are scattered about the Clark’s massive 140-acre campus. The works were also planned with the changing landscape—and visitors hoping to escape into the bucolic wilds of the Berkshires—in mind.
    “Ground/work,” according to the museum, “highlights the balance between fragility and resilience that both nature and the passage of time reveal, while offering fresh experiences with every visit.” The works were conceived in part as a way to help visitors re-enter the world again, following a long year of isolation, and gently encourages them to re-engage with themes like the comforts of nature and community.
    One of the most striking works in the show is perhaps Eva LeWitt’s Resin Towers (2020), which were assembled by the New York-based artist from tall pieces of colorful plastic in hues like fluorescent orange, yellow, and light aqua, and cast in layers of transparent resin. Together, the pieces create a pattern of expanding and contracting spheres as the viewer approaches the works or moves further away, depending on where they stand. The work was also planned to interact with particular elements of the landscape (including the sky, woods, grass, and light) and time of day, morphing as time passes, and seems to twirl more and more quickly as viewers approach it as if to “call them down the hill and beckon visitors to their site.”
    The works, which in many ways celebrate the “purity of hue against an ever-shifting landscape,” according to the museum, will be on view until October 17. See images of the show below.
    Eva LeWitt, “Resin Towers” (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    A closeup of one of LeWitt’s “Resin Towers” (2020. Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    LeWitt with her artwork. Photo courtesy Eva Lewitt.
    A closeup of one of LeWitt’s “Resin Towers” (2020. Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    One of LeWitt’s “Resin Towers” (2020. Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    Eva LeWitt, “Resin Towers” (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    Eva LeWitt, “Resin Towers” (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
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    ‘Everything on This Planet Is Endangered’: Artist Tino Sehgal’s New Show in England Enacts the ‘Immaterial Magic’ of Impermanence

    Visitors milling around the Great Court at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire last Friday were caught off guard by the sound of a swelling chorus. A troupe of players who, moments before, had seemed like any other tourists there to discover the stately rooms and sprawling grounds of the Baroque countryside estate, broke out into a series of trance-like intonations: “wow, ooh, wow, ooh.”
    For the audience invited to see the work of Berlin-based visual artist Tino Sehgal, the troupe’s movements around the courtyard might have evoked the nonsensical dadaist performance art of the interwar years. But I could also relate to the bemused expressions of unsuspecting visitors to the palace, who might more readily have related it to the carefully choreographed flash mobs that were popular marketing ploys in the early 2000s. Either way, it was all a bit weird.
    Sehgal is revered in the art world for creating these kinds of scenes, which the 45-year-old artist calls “constructed situations,” designed to stir viewers out of passivity. His artistic practice eschews physical objects, relying on the human responses to these ephemeral live events. Once played out, there is no physical documentation of the work in the form of exhibition catalogues, video recordings, or photographs.
    “My basic premise is: Can you make an artwork without making an object? So why would I, on a secondary level, then make a photograph?” Sehgal asked me, as we sat in a shade overlooking one of Blenheim’s manicured gardens.
    Blenheim Park and Gardens. Landscaping by Capability Brown. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
    Even without the wristbands identifying us, you could pretty easily tell the art audience from those who had just stumbled upon the work. Only the latter group (the larger one) reflexively whipped out their cell phones to take pictures. Sehgal has given up trying to control this particular impulse from the public. “I don’t mind it if it is for their private use,” Sehgal told me. “Society has changed. When my work first started, mobile phones literally didn’t even have a camera.”
    Sehgal, who is of German and Indian descent, has been exalted by many critics as among the greatest artists of his generation. In 2005, he was the youngest artist ever chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale, for which he sent performers dressed as security guards pirouetting around visitors to the pavilion chanting, “Ooh, this is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!” He later won the Golden Lion for work included in the 2013 biennale.
    His current exhibition, on view through August 15, was staged by the Blenheim Art Foundation, and blends elements of some of his past works with new scenes designed specifically to respond to the environment of the palace grounds. Sehgal was introduced to Blenheim in the spring because he was looking for a maze to site a project, one of the first initiatives organized as part of veteran gallerist Marian Goodman’s nomadic exhibition program after closing her permanent London space, Marian Goodman Projects. As chance would have it, the art foundation did not have an exhibition scheduled for this summer, and Sehgal was suddenly invited to make a much larger project than he had initially envisioned, unfolding across the vast grounds of the estate.
    Tino Sehgal in the grounds at Blenheim. Photo by Edd Horder. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
    Social Distancing and Intimacy
    “It was really spontaneous,” Sehgal told me. “But Michael [Frahm, director of Blenheim Art Foundation] was adamant that he wanted to do it now after corona, and it made sense for me after we have been deprived of human interaction for so long.” 
    Both Frahm and Sehgal’s main producer, Louise Höjer, were up for the “sports-like challenge” of pulling off the exhibition in just a few months.
    “After a long year distanced one from another, Tino’s work feels more relevant than ever: bringing bodies together in space and calling attention to the fleeting, immaterial magic of human connection,” Frahm wrote in his introductory statement.
    Höjer traveled to the U.K. ahead of Sehgal and scouted 52 amateur participants from the local area, ranging in age from 16 to 74, to take part. A few of Sehgal’s regular dancers, in-demand contemporary stars from Brussels and Berlin, also traveled to take part. 
    Then there was the matter of organizing an exhibition based on human interaction for the age of social distancing. Although it was mostly staged in an outdoor setting, they decided it would be best for the players approaching visitors to don masks and keep their distance, as a sign of respect and to help people feel safe.
    Tino Sehgal in the Rose Garden at Blenheim. Photo by Edd Horder. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
    The roving troupe of dancers intermittently swarmed around the visitors to the art foundation, shepherding us throughout the grounds to where other works materialized. Outside, in the secret garden, a young girl serenaded passersby, an iteration of Sehgal’s 2006 work, This You. Inside the grandiose Great Hall, amid classical statuary including Venus and Bacchus, an intertwined couple writhed on the floor for Sehgal’s Kiss (2002), re-enacting kiss scenes from famous works of art throughout history, from Auguste Rodin’s embracing nudes to Jeff Koons and Iona Staller’s more provocative poses.
    A more recent work, This Joy, conceived last year for the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna, occurred next to a small fountain. Players sang out a bizarrely electric scat version of Beethoven’s Für Elise, which built to a crescendo that was theatrically synchronized with a burst of water springing from the fountain.
    The most affecting parts of the exhibition were the works specifically designed to respond to the palace grounds. Across the vast lawn in front of the palace, on the majestic water terraces, and nestled in the rose garden, players almost blended into the landscape. If you weren’t paying attention, your eye might have glossed over them as picnickers on the lawn or even perhaps more delicate shrubbery designed by Capability Brown. If you got close enough to one of the players, they might approach you and share details about their lives.
    This story-telling component of the new work, titled This Element, borrows from Sehgal’s These Associations, a work first shown at Tate Modern in 2012. The stories shared by the participants are answers to a number of prompts from the artist, such as: When have you felt a sense of arrival? What is something you are dissatisfied with in yourself? What are the personality traits of somebody you admire? But the artist does not control what intimacies they share beyond this.
    When I summoned up the courage to open myself up, and gave permission with my eyes for someone to approach me, it was a local bus driver, who told me about a regular passenger of his, an elderly gentleman who battles his own physical decline to ride the bus to go and visit his niece every Thursday. The story was not particularly emotional, but after a year and a half of being starved of interaction with friends, let alone strangers, I was in a very raw emotional state. I was embarrassed when tears welled up in my eyes.
    Blenheim Park and Gardens. Landscaping by Capability Brown. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
    The Lesson of Beach Volleyball 
    Sehgal’s art tends to trigger this kind of reaction. And despite his forbearance of objects, he does actually sell his work—which he does through oral agreements with no paper trail. The rights to stage his situations have sold for six figure sums to museums including the Hirshhorn, MoMA, and the Guggenheim, as well as many private collections.
    “There is not a huge [market] but when people are interested, the fact that we do it with an oral contract is not really an issue,” he said. “If anything, it is maybe something that they find attractive.” If buyers want to show it, they need to give a six-months heads up, and trusted associates of the artist will be dispatched to set it up.
    I asked him what he thinks about the possible legacy of his work given that it is so ephemeral. What happens when he’s gone, and the chain of knowledge dilutes the work further and further from its original iteration? But Sehgal is not worried about obsolescence. He intentionally structures his situations like a game, with basic rules of play, and the interruption of chance encounters means that no two situations are exactly alike anyway. He could get deep into the theory behind this, but he offers a helpful sports analogy.
    “Nobody is worried that beach volleyball would cease to exist because you have got the rules,” he shrugged. “People can play it better or worse, but it is still beach volleyball.”
    Besides, material objects face obsolescence too. Paintings can burn up in a fire, or be eaten by pests, or deteriorate through age. “Somebody attacked a Barnett Newman at the Stedelijk Museum once—that can happen,” Sehgal pointed out. “I think everything on this planet is, in that sense, endangered and can deteriorate. And with art objects we make a big effort to ensure that they don’t… . So I think it is just a question of effort, finances, will, [and] planning decisions.”
    He recalled a particularly important exchange he had with a conservator during his early days in the art world, who pointed out that most of the objects that populate museums would not exist today without careful conservation and restoration efforts. “We don’t really conserve paintings, we produce them,” the conservator said. “When a painting has been restored three times, is it the same painting?”
    In that sense, Sehgal’s object-less work doesn’t seem any less ephemeral. He invited me to look further back into the past. “We have the tendency to think that objects are what remain or persist, but if you go back to antiquity, it is Plato,” he said, and “ideas that continue to exist.”
    Tino Sehgal is on view at Blenheim Art Foundation through August 15.
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    See 5 Riveting Manchester International Artworks, From a Celebration of Black Portraiture to a Reflection on Migration

    As the Manchester International Arts Festival continues into its final weeks, we decided to take a look at some of the best contemporary art interventions happening around the city.
    From an installation by Forensic Architecture on the occasion of the group’s 10th anniversary, to the transformation of a Jewish synagogue into a meditation on community and history, here are five must-see works.

    The most Instagrammable artwork on display is Big Ben Lying Down with Political Books, an installation by Argentine artist Marta Minujín. The work is a 140-foot replica of London’s famous clock, seemingly fallen to the grounds of Piccadilly Gardens. The work is another in a series of book-covered monuments the artist has installed at art events over the decades. This one contains 20,000 copies of “books that have shaped British politics” in an effort to spark conversations about the state today, as Britain reckons with new coronavirus strains and the repercussions of Brexit.

    Claire Govender adds the 20,000th book to “Ben Ben Lying Down with Political Books” by Marta Minujin, Photo: Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.

    Cephas Williams, Portrait of Black Britain (2021)
    Yandass Ndlovu, a participant of “Portrait of Black Britain” at the installation. Photo Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.
    “Portrait of Black Britain is me taking control of my narrative, asking other Black people to join me in the reintroduction of our presence and stories in the 21st century,” Cephas Williams wrote of his Manchester art installation.
    In this massive undertaking, Williams has embarked on a mission to create the largest photographic trove of Black British people ever created. For the project, Williams asked ordinary individuals to share their stories, successful or not, and then presented the 116 portraits he took.
    Cephas Williams’s installation “Portrait of Black Britain” part of Manchester International Arts Festival. Photo: Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.

    Laure Prouvost, The long waited, weighted, gathering (2021). Photo: Michael Pollard.
    Turner Prize-winner Laure Prouvost has transformed the Ladies Gallery in the newly renovated 1874 synagogue that houses the Manchester Jewish Museum into a time machine. The installation features textiles and a film that pays homage to the Jewish women who helped build Manchester into a modern city, and found comfort and safety within the walls of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue. Prouvost worked with contemporary members of the Women’s Textile Group to create objects within the installation that reference themes of migration, community, femininity, and religion.
    Laure Prouvost, The long waited, weighted, gathering (2021). Photo: Michael Pollard.

    Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2012–ongoing)
    Still from Forensic Architecture Cloud Studies (2012–ongoing), courtesy Forensic Architecture.
    Ten years ago, when the art and activist group Forensic Architecture was just forming, no one could predict the impact it would have on the art world. In an exhibition commemorating the group’s decade-long practice, a group of works from a variety of its past investigations come together in a wrenching exploration of how the air we breathe is co-opted to “suppress civilian protest, maintain and defend violent border regimes, and empower extractive industry.” The exhibition also features the first phase in Forensic Architecture’s new work exploring environmental racism in Louisiana, where an area deemed “Cancer Alley” has wreaked havoc on generations of Black residents.
    Forensic Architecture with Forensic Oceanography, The Seizure of the luventa (2017), courtesy Forensic Architecture.
    Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2008-21). Photo: Michael Pollard.
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    After Years of Heated Debate, an Exhibition Dedicated to Jewish Art Dealer Max Stern Is Moving Forward—and His Heirs Are Not Happy

    An exhibition dedicated to the life and legacy of persecuted Jewish art dealer Max Stern will go forward this fall in Düsseldorf—despite opposition from scholars and the dealer’s own heirs.
    The show, called “Disenfranchised and Deprived: The Art Dealer Max Stern,” will open at the Stadtmuseum in Düsseldorf on September 1 (until January 30, 2022), three years after it was initially canceled amid a dispute between local authorities and Stern’s heirs over how the German city was handling the project. The heirs, a group of international universities, were concerned that German authorities were not being transparent enough about the works linked to Stern that remain scattered around Germany and have yet to be returned.
    Düsseldorf mayor Stephan Keller plans to present an updated concept for the show next week. The exhibition will focus on Stern’s personal and professional life as an important art historian and art dealer based in Düsseldorf.
    Stern was running a successful gallery in Düsseldorf until 1937, when the Nazis forced him to dissolve his company. He fled Germany and eventually landed in Montreal, Canada, where he ran another successful gallery.
    The large-scale exhibition was originally called off in 2017 by the mayor at the time, Thomas Geisel, after the Canada-based Max Stern Art Restitution Project, run by heirs to his estate in both Canada and Israel, withdrew their support over concerns that the show was not being transparent about the potentially looted art that remains in German museums. Works once owned by Stern still hang in public museums in Düsseldorf.
    While city authorities did not provide an official explanation for the cancellation at the time, they obliquely attributed it to “current demands for information and restitution in German museums in connection with the Galerie Max Stern,” according to The Art Newspaper. (To the Art Restitution Project, this statement suggested they were more interested in securing the return of artworks than assisting with the show.)
    Max Stern in 1925.
    A letter to the mayor by Georgetown University professor Ori Z. Soltes stated that the German museum failed to “heal wounds that remain open more than seven decades after they were inflicted,” and instead “unilaterally cancelled the project” to protect its holdings, according to a 2017 report in the Globe and Mail.
    Instead of the exhibition, in 2018, Germany held an international symposium on Stern’s legacy in an effort to quell the disputes, before resurrecting plans for the show. (Its original rescheduled date, fall 2020, was called off due to the pandemic.)
    While the show now has a new date, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project and the Canadian curatorial team are no longer involved—nor are they happy about the new direction.
    “After the politically-controlled decision that prompted the cancellation of the original exhibition, Canadian scholars refuse to be associated with an administration that once questioned their academic legitimacy,” a spokesperson for the project told Artnet News in a statement. “They have dedicated a significant part of their careers to the study of Max Stern’s life. We prefer to focus on our current research collaboration on Max Stern with Munich’s Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. Without the expert contributions of these Canadian and German scholars, there is no reason for our project to be involved.”
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