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ArtReview vol 68 no 8 November 2016
Scales of Justice Another year, another list. Welcome to the latest iteration of ArtReview’s annual analysis of the players who pull art’s strings! In the context of terrorist attacks, military conflicts and the political and social atomisation that has characterised the last 12 months, talk about power in art can at times feel a little ridiculous. Art, in and of itself, can’t stop conflicts, can’t prevent social inequality, can’t provide justice for those without it. People, communities and their actions do that (which might explain why many of the artists, curators, galleries and collectors on this year’s list make such an effort to involve communities in their work). And yet, without ignoring the facts of suffering and inequality that are their most immediate effect, at the root of most of the world’s conflicts is a battle of ideas and of differing perspectives on how we view the world. And in art, as much as in lists like the one you are about to read, its fundamental nature lies in the articulation of a variety of points of view. We all know that these days art isn’t one thing, but many – sculptures, installations, paintings, performances, texts, videos, the recontextualising of found objects, a walk, a meal, the presentation of archives, to name just a few of the ways in which art is materialised. Hell, sometimes an artwork comprises no materials at all. And as we also well know, one person’s masterpiece is another person’s trash. In that way, ArtReview’s Power 100 is often the basis for discussion rather than an assertion of fact, although it is always the result of a rigorous process of investigation, analysis and, most crucially debate. That’s why ArtReview would encourage you not to sit in a locked room and whine about its list, but rather to make your feelings known. If you want you can send them to this guy: markrappolt@artreview.com and expand the debate.
Spiritual
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Indeed, for ArtReview, that’s one of the most important effects of viewing an artwork: that it provokes discussion, conversation and debate. And the articulation of those debates, whether in conversation or in magazines such as this one, is a fundamental part of the shared experience of viewing art. Particularly in a world in which freedom of expression is not always so readily available. As much as ArtReview does its best to keep its list rooted in actions and facts, it is not a concrete monolith, but naturally something that will be the subject of dispute and also perhaps something to be undermined. Importantly too, it’s not an expression of ArtReview’s likes or loathings – that’s what reviews are for. Rather it’s an analysis of how the structures of art work to make some and not other artworks more public. And that’s important if you take the view, as ArtReview does, that art and the freedoms it offers have a role to play in examining or imagining the society around it: how we interact and communicate with people, how we can express happiness, pleasure, anger or pain while nevertheless doing as little damage as possible to the world at large. ArtReview is not comparing art to Jainism here, but it is suggesting that the environment in which art is made manifest is something that requires nurturing and at times protection as well. And for ArtReview, art is something to which, without pandering to populism and fame, everyone should have access. That’s the whole point of a magazine such as this. For those of you who want more on Trevor Paglen’s cover and interior artworks, turn to page 92; for those of you who want to know about how ArtReview’s power business works, go to page 101. And for those of you who want to dive straight in, you’ll be looking for page 102. Peace. ArtReview out. ArtReview
Learning
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Rothko Dark Palette
510 West 25th Street, New York November 4, 2016 – January 7, 2017
Art Previewed
Previews by Martin Herbert 49
Eva Hesse on assholes and existentialists Interview by Matthew Collings 72
Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Laura McLean-Ferris, Heather Phillipson, Jonathan T. D. Neil & Jonathan Grossmalerman 65
page 49 Kerry James Marshall, Rythm Mastr, 1999–present, inkjet on Plexiglas in lightboxes. © and courtesy the artist
November 2016
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Power 100
Trevor Paglen Interview by Oliver Basciano 92
A History of Power by Martin Gayford 148
The Power 100 101
(Inter)national Collections by Thomas Forwood 150
On the Couch Interview by ArtReview 144
Biennial Burnout by Joshua Decter 154
page 92 Trevor Paglen, NSA Surveillance Base, Egelsbach, Germany, 2015, c-print, 91 × 141 cm. Courtesy the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco
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ArtReview
The Year in Review
Art and the Wider World, 2015–16 by ArtReview 160
THE STRIP 178 A CURATOR WRITES 182
page 160 Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015, nylon, 213 × 133 cm, New York. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
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Art Previewed
Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power 47
Previewed Kerry James Marshall Met Breuer, New York 25 October – 29 January
Jutta Koether Campoli Presti, London through 12 November
Roman Ondak South London Gallery through 6 January
Isa Genzken Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles through 31 December
Martin Creed Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck through 20 November
Nina Canell Barbara Wien, Berlin through 30 November
Josh Kline Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin 4 November – 26 February
Edward Krasiński Tate Liverpool 21 October – 5 March
Dan Graham Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon 17 November – 7 January
13th Cuenca Biennial Various venues, Cuenca 21 October – 31 December
6 Josh Kline, Desperation Dilation, 2016, cast sculptures in silicone, shopping cart, polyethylene bags, rubber, Plexiglas, LEDs and power source, 117 × 74 × 102 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York
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The uniqueness of the Met Breuer, the Metropolitan Museum’s contemporary art division housed in the revamped former Whitney Museum building, is its ability to counterpoint work by living artists with art and artefacts from 5,000 years of storied 1 past. That’ll be made crystal-clear by Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition Mastry, touring in augmented fashion from the MCA Chicago. Surveying the masterful American artist’s 35 years and more of painting (and more), it features 80 works, 72 of them paintings, tracing the Alabama-born artist’s virtuoso restitution of black subjectivity within painting via a compound pictorial language ranging from neoclassical portraiture to abstraction to comics. (The title refers to the artist’s comicsrooted Rythm Mastr series, 1999–present.) Marshall’s largest museum retrospective to date – which, along the way, reconvenes The Garden Project, a mid-1990s series split for two
the legendarily stringent, often gallerydecades – would be draw enough. But compleevacuating conceptualist and longtime influmenting all this activity is Kerry James Marshall ential teacher at CalArts. Now, looking back Selects, for which Marshall has picked 40 works on that, Genzken, whose darkly vivacious from the Met collection (Northern Renaissance post-medium practice has often focused on painting, Postimpressionism, African masks, the galvanic powers of city life, will present midcentury American photography) to reassert a new sculptural installation that conflates his art’s wellsprings and grasp. Expect, across a tribute to Los Angeles with a homage to these two projects, the institutional equivalent Asher, who died in 2012. Her clear-cut feelings of a mic drop. towards him may be gleaned from the exhibiIsa Genzken doesn’t lack for retrospectives, 2 tion title: I Love Michael Asher. or international reach. We had hardly blinked after seeing her big show in Vienna in 2014 Another key conceptualist Genzken met before another colossus opened in Berlin 3 on her California excursus was Dan Graham. (arriving from Amsterdam), while her US survey But saying you love Dan Graham is fairly toured for three years up to 2015. But for her first redundant since, frankly, who doesn’t? major Los Angeles show (in another capacious As influential as Asher’s art in a different way, space, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel), she’s drawing Graham’s sense of architecture is, of course, on the past in a new way. In 1977, when Genzken less sanguine than Genzken’s. He sees it as was in her late twenties and teaching at the art a Foucauldian instrument of control, as his academy in Düsseldorf, she got a travel grant deceptively cool pavilions with their structures to California and there visited Michael Asher, of two-way mirrors, interstitial between art
1 Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2009, acrylic on PVC panel, 113 × 110 × 10 cm. Photo: Nathan Keay. © the artist
2 Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2016, polystyrene, shoes, orchid, flowerpot, tape, 124 × 47 × 50 cm. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy the artist; Hauser & Wirth, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York
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3 Dan Graham, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon
5 Martin Creed, Work No. 1878, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 51 × 41 cm. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography London. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London
4 Jutta Koether, K-Bild, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 130 × 80 cm. Courtesy the artist and Campoli Presti, London & Paris
and architecture (and at home in galleries and the contested realm of public space), continue to assert via their intricate play of reflections, turning viewer into viewed and vice versa. Following Foucault, Graham has called these works ‘heterotypes’, cogent interruptions in the administered blur of urban living; they’re pleasurable places to hang around, but they carry a sting. Not that we’re certain he’ll produce a pavilion-related work for Lisbon, mind you, given that Graham’s practice has encompassed performance video, photography, writing and the epochal 1982–4 sociological art film Rock My Religion. But we’d be surprised if he can wholly resist the allure of Portuguese light on steel and glass. (Side note: for all his outward rationalism, Graham is also the biggest astrology nerd that ArtReview has ever met.) Jutta Koether, who’s as much an artist/ 4 writer as Graham (if not more so), used to write for Berlin’s Spex magazine, but when it comes
In a recent BBC TV programme on Dada, to her forthcoming show at Campoli Presti, Best of Studios, we have no specs at all. Fair to 5 Martin Creed was royally trounced in a portraiture faceoff with comedian Vic Reeves. say, though, that Koether has long been a pro(Neither of them was permitted to look while ponent of so-called network painting, which is painting, but still.) He also admitted he hadn’t rooted in the work of her late Cologne contemknown, when he half-filled a room with balloons, porary Martin Kippenberger, and her painting that the Dadaists had gotten there first. His – its rough-edged lyricism and layering recalworks can look like oneliners, sometimes ling Sigmar Polke, its palette often pinkish, unappetising ones (videos of people shitting its outlook often punkish – reflexively emphaand vomiting, screwed-up sheets of A4 paper). sises the act of its own reading via a miscellany And he’s a terrible um-ing and ah-ing interof reference points. Yet in her last show at Campoli Presti’s London branch, in 2013, Koether viewee. But! The Wakefield-born artist/musiinvoked (via Jacques Derrida’s 1969 lecture cian/choreographer is an artist of deceptively grand affect. Brought together, his works accrete ‘The Double Session’, after which she titled the into a swaying meditation on control and its show) a notion of ‘double reading’. So whatever limits, myriad small gestures that serve as we did say about her latest work – an open prospect, given her historical veering into anything attempts to bring order and system to life’s from musical/artistic collaboration (with Kim messiness, allied to a perpetual, almost desGordon) to sculptural installation – there’d perate inventiveness. Here, Creed has his first probably be something else to say too, and we solo exhibition in the ordered purlieus of consider ourselves off the hook. Austria, where the far right is dangerously
November 2016
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8 Roman Ondak, The Source of Art is in the Life of a People, 2016 (installation view, South London Gallery). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
7 Henrique Oliveira and Francisco Togni at work on Oliveira’s installation for the Cuenca Biennial at the Colegio Nacional Benigno Malo, Cuenca
in the ascendant. Perhaps the artist’s neons (eg EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT, 1999, DON’T WORRY, 2003) will be judiciously held back. While the term ‘Postinternet’ becomes a malign historical artefact, one figure likely to survive the loosely affiliated genre’s dissolu6 tion is Josh Kline. The Philadelphia-born artist has a uniquely forceful way of compressing, and connecting, capitalised issues of the moment: state control, unbridled consumerism, rampant inequality and waste. See, for example, his hyperreal, end-of-days installation at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (dispatched from a recent show at New York’s 47 Canal), Unemployment (2016). Here, mesh boxes and shopping trolleys, glowing from beneath, brim with silicone bottles that are either fleshcoloured or sprout human hands, and are surrounded by foetal human figures – smallbusiness owners, mortgage loan officers,
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lawyers (according to the titles) – in clear plastic a goodly number of Ecuadorian artists includtrash bags. As Kline himself has suggested, ing Janeth Méndez, Damián Sinchi and Kelver this is effectively sampling applied to sculpture, Ax. The last Cuenca Biennial was deemed an splicing aspects of the everyday together; it’s also installation art-filled flop; Cameron, founder of Prospect New Orleans and a veteran at mounting the stuff of real-world nightmares. 7 Curated by Dan Cameron, the 13th Cuenca strong shows in tricky places, seems like a smart Biennial – that’s the Cuenca in Ecuador, not choice to reverse the event’s trajectory. the Cuenca in Spain – is, like all biennales, Neatly, at the same time (though far, far 8 away), Roman Ondak is setting up a show that a temporary thing. In this case, though, that’s points to both the momentary and the longapt: the US curator’s IMPERMANENCIA, Mutable Art in a Materialist Society aims to outline a divide term. The Slovak artist’s previous works, in contemporary art: between work that’s exploring patterns of behaviour, have regularly speculated on and stored in a vault, and work gravitated towards the social, whether in setting that is relatively ephemeral and mirrors our up mysterious queues of people or, in Measuring current situation. The title of the show might the Universe (2007–), getting people to mark their heights on the wall to create a dark, flowing hint at which side of the line Cameron favours abstraction symbolising myriad individuals here; in his curatorial statement, he also measuring themselves. In The Source of Art is in suggests a sunny upside to a focus on imperthe Life of a People at the South London Gallery manence by linking it to Buddhism. Thirteen – Ondak’s first London show in a decade – for venues house 49 participants, including Kader a hundred days that symbolises a hundred years, Attia, Cao Fei, Cevdet Erek, Hew Locke and
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a presawn disc will be separated, daily, from an oak tree’s trunk, revealing a line drawn round one of its rings and a text describing an important historical event from the year in question. These will go on the wall, creating an expanding calendar, but also one that points up the subjectivity of historical process (this is Ondak’s view of what was important, after all.) Alongside these, meanwhile, are – among other things – blow-ups of pages from a textbook on social behaviour that the sociable artist has invited twelve-to-eighteen-year-olds in the area to daub, deface or otherwise editorialise. Someone else does the work, Tom Sawyer-style, and the result is art that mobilises open-endedness and addresses authority under the guise of largesse. Also on the subject of art invested with 9 life: for a number of years now, Nina Canell has been making sculptural work concerning, 10 as a press text from Barbara Wien puts it,
‘the place and displacement of energy’, allowing a supposedly static form to animate, change, lose fixity – become, if you like, more like life. In the past, this has meant (among other things) sculptures set rattling by steam passing through them; electric cables chopped and suspended in tanks, suggesting the containing of a residual charge. In her third show with her Berlin gallery, Foam-Skin Insulated Jelly-Filled Vowel, Canell extends a vocabulary that’s both postminimal and anthropomorphic: coils of hollowed-out subterranean fibre optic cable look like sheaths of shed snakeskin, while another installation sets the ‘short-term memory’ of wires into motion via sine waves. Yeah, us neither, but we’re going to find out. Generally this column focuses only on living artists. But we’re making an exception for Edward Krasiński (1925–2004), since he was himself exceptional and his first UK
retrospective (at Tate Liverpool) is an occasion to be marked. A key member of the Polish avant-garde, Krasiński zoomed through various formats (graphic design, neo-Surrealism, works involving objects dangling on wires, suggesting movement), before his signature blue Scotch tape appeared. This would go on to slink horizontally across objects, all kinds of exhibiting spaces and the axonometric Intervention paintings he began making in the early 1970s; later, Krasiński moved on to making mazes. But his taping is the thing: a Dadaist provocation, a conceptualist approach equal to Daniel Buren’s stripes or Stanley Brouwn’s measurements, an infinitely resourceful approach with materials that could be carried in the pocket and bought for almost nothing. ‘I don’t know if this is art,’ Krasiński once said. ‘I know that it’s a blue Scotch tape, width 19mm, length unknown.’ Martin Herbert
10 Edward Krasiński, Intervention 15, 1975, tape and paint on hardboard, 70 × 50 × 3 cm. © Estate of Edward Krasiński. Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
9 Nina Canell in collaboration with Robin Watkins, Flexions (detail), 2016. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin
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The inside of 「Into the hole」, colors and ink on Korean paper, 85.8×67 in, 2009
EUNSIL LEE
P E R F E C T LY M AT C H E D 11.17-12.29
Do o san Gallery New Yo r k
Revolt of the Sage 24 November 2016 — 21 January 2017 Horst Ademeit Lynn Chadwick Hanne Darboven Haris Epaminonda Geoffrey Farmer Jannis Kounellis Mark Lewis Goshka Macuga Christian Marclay Simon Moretti David Noonan Sigmar Polke Erin Shirreff Michael Simpson John Stezaker Paloma Varga Weisz
Erin Shirreff, Still (no. 8) (detail), 2016, Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co
Curated by Simon Moretti & Craig Burnett
London | 4 Hanover Square
BRUCE NAUMAN Natural Light, Blue Light Room 5 October — 12 November 2016
London | 4 Hanover Square
Bruce Nauman, Natural Light, Blue Light Room, 1971, Installation View, 2016 © Bruce Nauman 2016, Photo: Peter Mallet
AZADEH RAZAGHDOOST
RECIPE FOR A POEM 24 November 2016 - 10 February 2017
SOPHIA CONTEMPORARY GALLERY 11 Grosvenor Street, London, W1K 4QB, UK www.sophiacontemporary.com My Winey Paper (detail), 2010, Oil and pencil on canvas, 180 x 130 cm
Until 15 January 2017 Book now Members go free nationalgallery.org.uk #BeyondCaravaggio This exhibition is a collaboration between the National Gallery, London, the National Gallery of Ireland, and the National Galleries of Scotland Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ (detail), 1602. On indefinite loan to the National Gallery of Ireland from the Jesuit Community, Leeson St., Dublin who acknowledge the kind generosity of the late Dr Marie Lea-Wilson. Photo © The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Points of View
Last month I was sticking up for some truculent German theatre people – those employees and supporters of Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre – against the shrill condescension of some heavy-artillery artworld curators, pissed off at how the Volksbühne’s defenders had ganged up on their mate Chris Dercon, who’s been appointed as the theatre’s new artistic director. The international curators, readers will remember, warned the Berlin government that to give in to the agitation of protesters would be to ‘relinquish all claims to being an open city, a cosmopolitan place where professionals can accept an appointment in good faith’. As that column went to press, the latest – and, as it turns out, last – issue of Frieze d/e flopped through the letterbox. Frieze d/e, the German spinoff of Frieze magazine, has, after five years, ceased publication, and while the reasons for this are best left to its editors in their farewell editorial, a couple of the issue’s lead articles are worth a moment’s attention, since they reveal something of the trouble of contemporaryartworld people as they grapple with the harsh realities of a moment in which the more populist dynamics of national politics are starting to encroach on the artworld’s much-cherished idea of its own cosmopolitanism. As Freize d/e contributing editor Jan Verwoert suggests, in a somewhat self-pitying polemic, the artworld’s ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ is now faced with growing antagonism from more local and national political pressures. Verwoert is upset because he gets shouted at in a department store while he’s buying a trolley suitcase: a stranger accuses him of being ‘one of them, the managers, the henchmen!’ As Verwoert muses glumly: ‘the euphoria of the European opening of the 1990s is now giving way to suspicions that the children of an art world without borders and Iron Curtains might be the henchmen of
the anxiety of ‘the rootless guild’ J.J. Charlesworth carries on investigating the arrogance of the global artistic elite a uniform global culture contaminated by money’. ‘This rootless guild’, Verwoert calls it, ‘includes curators, intellectuals and artists who move from place to place for jobs and projects.’ Verwoert goes on to catalogue recent instances across Europe where outsider curators and directors have fallen prey to the increasingly populist machinations of local politics and local politicians. Elsewhere in the issue, a roundtable focuses on the Volksbühne controversy. There, the issue of cosmopolitanism is given a contemporary axis: it’s the arrival of a completely new demographic of young Europeans that makes the more German-focused artistic project of the old theatre redundant. As theatre critic Tobi Müller puts it, ‘these people are part of an educated, creative middle class’. In the new, more unstable Europe, the older, more benign accommodation of contemporary cultural production is increasingly victim to the grinding consequences of economic stagnation, as arts funding bears the brunt of cuts in countries once lauded for their state support of culture. The ‘rootless guild’ had always depended on the favour of local and national politics; yet it was
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that favour that allowed it to become an international circuit of free-floating professionals increasingly distanced from those local and national contexts. The flipside of this is that cultural hubs like Berlin or London – internationalised, transient, increasingly based in servicesector and financial economies – have themselves become the enclaves or city-states of the ‘rootless guild’. And in those circumstances, what it means to have any kind of relationship to your adopted country, or a ‘national’ cultural debate of any sort, becomes increasingly alien and meaningless. But then the real problem for the ‘rootless guild’ is that the context it inhabits has changed – from an international culture of positive contacts between local and national scenes, into a transnational culture in which individuals of all nationalities combine, supported by an even more alien economy driven by the flows of private capital. That the ‘children of an art world without borders’ might actually be ‘the henchmen of a uniform global culture contaminated by money’ may be difficult to accept for those who, like Verwoert, grew up in the more optimistic years of the emerging, internationalising artworld of the late 90s. But it’s that mutation that needs to be faced head-on, since in the end it risks estranging artists and other members of the ‘rootless guild’ from the societies they inhabit, reinforcing the ‘us vs them’ confrontation by which Verwoert is so disturbed. In an odd sort of Freudian slip in their farewell note, the publishers of Frieze d/e talk about ‘docking with the mothership Frieze’. It’s the image of an entity floating free from the harsher realities of negotiating real – social, political, cultural – life down here on planet earth. It is, of course, a fantasy. A fantasy of escape, in the face of an intolerable realisation: far from being the solution for global culture, you may be the problem.
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Having followed performance art over a number of years, I began to become conscious of a particular phenomenon I didn’t much like. It was a tendency for young female artists to continually produce a narrative arc within their performances that moved through increasing erratic behaviour towards fullblown hysteria. Some years ago, in a former fish factory in Reykjavík, I was watching a performance series featuring three works by three different young women, all of which ended in a hysterical, foamy-mouthed climax. All three women were carried off at the end, usually by men, who tied them up, slapped them down or tranquillised them. After seeing three of these narratives in quick succession, I didn’t want to see any ever again, and I wondered if I had witnessed a kind of performative tendency that each performer had somehow fallen into. At one point, at the end of one of these performances, a little girl on rollerblades skated up to me and tilted her head to the side: she had arrived at the factory with Björk and Matthew Barney, and I’m assuming it was their daughter. She gave me a pointed eyeroll as if to say, ‘Can you even?’ I raised my eyebrows at her. As sensitive as I am to the history of hysteria, and the way in which women’s bodies could revolt, protest, rage or give up on the conditions in which they found themselves, I tried to communicate to that little girl that I too ‘could not even’.
This week I saw a performance by choreographic duo FlucT, at Maccarone, New York, on the occasion of Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women, a restaging of a show curated by the late artist Ellen Cantor at David Zwirner Gallery in 1993. FlucT are Monica Mirabile and Sigrid Lauren, known for manic performances that are physically raw and rough-and-tumble – their kneepads are roundly abused as the pair regularly
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Logical hysteria Women performing hysteria has a long and problematic history in art. But are a series of recent works involving this coupling less problematic and more a reflection of our times? by
Laura McLean-Ferris pick each other up before slamming each other onto the floor. Worse, many of those floors are poured concrete, as the pair have been recently invited to perform in an artgallery context. Lauren and Mirabile were lying beneath a silky pink sheet when audiences entered the rear space at Maccarone, but emerged like crazed beribboned clown dolls with misapplied makeup smeared across their faces. In the context of a show about explicit sexuality, the piece sought to make a travesty of the schizophrenic representations of feminine sexuality: frilly bibs, lacy ruffles and stockings, pornography and teen pop stars were part of the duo’s performative collaging, as they routinely switched codes and modes. These two bodies staggered around taking turns carrying each other top to tail (nose to ass) and throwing each other to the ground, rolling around hysterically, shaking their buttocks and alternately appearing rationally calm and well put-together. The unmistakable intro bars of Britney Spears’s …Baby One More Time (1998), repeated over and over, provided a moment of pop comedy, as did Selena Gomez’s boudoirish sex-prep anthem Good for You (2015) – both tracks contain a kind of fried teenage Mickey Mouse Club sexuality. The body slamming was completely compelling, and as the performers FlucT, Sissy Joker La Pieta, 2016 (performance view). Photo: Minnie Bennet. Courtesy Maccarone, New York
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threw each other around violently I thought of the trust they must have in each other.
Though admittedly still a little baroque for my tastes, this kind of hysteria, a confusion based on mixed messages, seems pretty reasonable to me, partly because the anxiety displays its sources. It brought to mind another duo, New Noveta (Keira Fox and Ellen Freed), whose work I have only seen online, but even through the screen their performances appear to be unrelentingly stressful. The pair burst into galleries and set to work in a state of emergency, as though panicked into immediate action. For a performance at Sandy Brown in Berlin earlier this year, they yelled instructions at each other over roaring noise, breaking down a temporary shelter of poles, sheets and a pool of black liquid while wearing evening dresses and plastic bags full of fish eggs around their waists, ripped open for all to smell. They claw at each other and cut each other’s clothes, while also appearing to resist some incredible, hurricanelike force: clearly a disaster is on its way, for which they are unprepared. Both duos take physical risks in their performances and create a register of negative affects – strenuous efforts, bad smells, shrieking and physical intimacy touched by faint notes of glamour. Whereas thematic antecedents such as Marina Abramović (pain) and Yoko Ono (cutting fabric) performed with a repose informed by the art and imagery of the times, New Noveta and FlucT are performers of intimacy and generalised crisis, whether of identities or catastrophe. Consider that the most played track of the year (Rihanna’s Work) has the lonely line “Nobody text me in a crisis”, or that while I was watching the performance in Maccarone a bomb was going off close by in Chelsea, an event that didn’t seem to strike many people in this city as an enormous surprise.
Nobody wants to wake up to a blanket slicked with shit and vomit but this started my morning last week, and it was very real. I spent 30 solid minutes wrist-deep in excretions and extreme cleaners, and with a horselike tension of nostril. The responsible party was not even being disrespectful, nor responsible. She crawled onto the cold kitchen tiles and exuded regret and the haze which seeps from one’s spirit when one is sick. I wanted to tell her that it’s fine to burst out. That’s what bodies do, letting off their prosaic peculiarities. I’m more sorry the domesticated world weighs so heavily in her digestive system – this should be stopped and thought about, plus whatever happened to the white chalky dog-stools of the 1980s (the butchers stopped crushing bones into food, I suppose), and what quality is more necessary than surprise – how often are we truly surprised? Is this our fundamental bombshell – (communal) defecation? In a keen/quiet way, I tell her, I await your next voluptuary tour de force. Is it too much to ask your dog to understand you? Yes, if ‘understand’ means speaking in straightforwardly human ways. I don’t want to say things in straightforwardly human ways that are usually the quickest route between two points and that = death. WHAT GOOD DOES THAT DO FOR POETRY? I prefer to toss and turn in a fatty, logic-blocking fug. Being with a dog means being with nuance. It means facing up to our own farce, farce and more farce. So much to come across, so little to say. I don’t dare presume Marj cares to know what I think when I open my mouth to talk about such-and-such a topic. She makes me an inarticulate hulk. Now that we’ve inherited each other, we must, as Donna Haraway puts it, ‘learn how to see who the dogs are and hear what they are telling us’. Marj is willing to hear my voice – whether calling or cajoling, commanding,
shit poetry
Courtesy the artist
asking or serenading (frequently) – and, to every shade, respond appropriately, which is a tough and endless job. But she doesn’t conform with a reply. Dogs give us images, angular emotive music, unopened files. It is all conjecture. Marj locks on to a football and swings it around her head. There’s been a lot of talk on this, our worried island, of ‘taking back control’, which is the opposite of life as a domestic dog, I think. All that wholesale temperament and chewed-up rubber and the entirety of outdoor space a toilet and every open gate signifying ‘hi there’. The dog does not fear contaminations. And in this way and many others, the dog may be our best guide through the overgrowths of poetics-politics. I would like to write and go out as a dog goes out. With a twist of the hip and the air crisp, crisp and full of intrigue as a hand-gifted biscuit. Marj would go anywhere where the long grass and dogs are, trotting off proud, tail held high, to find a future friend or fried chicken bone tossed in the weeds, a swig of microbiome-rich puddle water. I am wary of telling her too much of my feelings. Barthes wrote that a compliment, like all adjectives, can damage. Am I not beyond all qualification? Poetry, like music, is more than words and song. When Marj is chewing other dogs’ shit, she has a nifty wiggle to her. It’s too good to waste while it’s cooling. But when I hold her jaw to extract it, inserting my fingers into her scratchy pockets of teeth, she allows me this tenderness of touching and talking – ‘Marj, let’s get that shit out of your mouth’ – as if she were my cherished grandmother (Marjorie) and I still her entreating grandchild. We start from a dense, unspoken nucleus of near-familiarity, with its moods and times of day, and stretch out towards and away from each other, and then where shall we go? What would it be like to change direction, sharply as a dog?
November 2016
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by
Heather Phillipson
I recently had a conversation with a reporter who was writing a piece on the arrival of TEFAF to American shores, and what this would do to the marketplace for art and the collectors that inhabit it. At some point the conversation got around to the question of art fairs in general and how they are creating fatigue for galleries and a new kind of collector for art, one who isn’t so much engaged in the artistic process or its history as in the transaction, as if on a quarterly buying spree, now in Miami, then in Basel, later in London, New York, Los Angeles, etc. I have heard the endless lament on the part of dealers and other market watchers that no one comes into the gallery any more, that so much of the job is either education on one hand, or pure sales on the other, and all of it conducted in five-day intensive face-time campaigns or during the nontime of email, text and Instagram. And isn’t one more art fair in New York just another storefront in this global shopping mall, whose entry halls are the regional airports where one parks the private jet, and where the food court is the private dining room at Eleven Madison Park or Claridge’s? TEFAF does represent something that art fairs focused exclusively on contemporary art don’t, and that’s expertise. Now I don’t want to sound like a booster for old-timey art or a Jeremiah for connoisseurship, both of which are easy positions to take when faced with contemporary art’s epiphenomenal onslaught. But there is something satisfying about the idea of a fair that asks all of its dealers to mount their wares and then locks them out for as long as it takes committees of scholars, conservators and historians to verify the authenticity and quality of the work on display. I particularly like that the fair’s vetting guidelines state, with regard to modern and contemporary art in particular, that ‘all the main movements in modern art may be included in this section, but works that are derivative or lacking in originality may be rejected by the vetting committee’. If the vetting committees stick to their mandate, one could expect the contemporary section to be rather small. Of course this vetting service is not offered for the sake of art. It’s for the sake of the market. TEFAF’s vetting is a kind of buyerprotection programme, which assumes that
I’m not a booster for old timey art, but… Jonathan T.D. Neil on
why TEFAF’s arrival in New York might herald the return of art ‘expertise’
from top The recently restored facade of Park Avenue Armory, site of TEFAF’s inaugural US exhibition, and the Board of Officers Room, renovated by Herzog & de Meuron. Courtesy Park Avenue Armory, New York
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the buyer, whoever he or she may be, has the interest, and the desire, for the goods on offer, but very likely does not have the depth of expertise in histories, materials and artisanal processes that one must have to tell the good stuff from the bad. In this TEFAF stands behind the work and the dealers it gathers for the benefit of the collecting public, which it knows is at a disadvantage to the dealers who deal in this stuff every day of their lives. The information asymmetry here is assumed. The ignorance of the collectorate isn’t some lamentable turn of events to be excoriated at 2am at the hotel bar, it’s a structural condition of the marketplace. And if TEFAF’s entrance onto New York’s shores is successful, it could presage a return to prominence of the kind of expertise once embodied by the auction houses, but which is now largely overlooked there. Because one of the complaints that one hears about the new class of ignorant collectors of contemporary art is that all they do is buy work at art fairs or off of Instagram and not after spending or ‘putting in’ the time in the galleries or the studios, as if one had to earn the right to buy; and the complaint one hears about the auction houses is that they have become largely client-services organisations that have cashiered their responsibility to the work on offer in favour of ever greater displays of consumerist theatre. But what does this say about that other class of collectors who only ever bought at auction because the auction rooms were only ever where the work was on offer? Being labelled as one who buys only at auction is not nearly as disdainful as being branded one who buys only from the fairs. Yet for a long time that is what collectors did, buy at auction, where the auction houses, like TEFAF, were called upon to provide a kind of buyer protection. As more and more work moves in a direct line from the fairs to the auction rooms, not to be flipped but to be liquidated, the auction houses – the big ones, the good ones – will again be charged with separating the good stuff from the bad, rather than just the marketable from the not. Expertise may not be able to correct for collectors’ stupidity, but at the least it can correct for their ignorance.
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I just got back from court, where I had to give a deposition to prove that a painting owned by a prison guard who had worked at the Tacoma State Women’s Correctional Facility™ in the mid 1980s was not, in fact, painted by me, Jonathan Grossmalerman. The absurdity was so outlandish that I have adamantly refused to authenticate it several times over the years. But she’s got college-age kids now, so I’m guessing she really needs to put the pressure on. Of course, my case has admittedly been made more difficult by the clearly written signature in the lower righthand corner. Also, my having spent an unclear amount of time at the Tacoma State Women’s Correctional Facility™ at around the time she claims is not helping, if… you know… viewed in the wrong light. You see, boasting a fantastic MFA programme as it did at the time, the Tacoma State Women’s Correctional Facility™ invited me to come as a visiting artist. Your standard lecture plus studio crits. And me, having a weakness for helping women in need, of course jumped at the chance. And yes, I was introduced to toilet wine there. I fully admit! But just because I developed a quick fondness for fermented ketchup and orange drink… I mean… that doesn’t mean I painted the damn painting! Did I black out my entire visit in a swoon of Pruno? Absolutely! And of course the lecture and studio crits were all delivered in a Prison Liquor-fuelled fugue state… But I’m not sure what the causal connection would be that goes from me blacking out to me painting a painting and giving it to some random prison guard. And, sure, I grant you that nothing can explain the two extra weeks I apparently spent there. I mean… frankly, I am just as curious as you are. And certainly I too wonder why I received all those tender, at times depressing and minutia obsessed but certainly always very threatening letters from Tacoma State Women’s Correctional Facility’s™ infamous homicidal maniac and death-row inmate, Darlene Mevronik. Darlene. She wrote me for years, right up until the day she was executed for her part in the Seattle Ice Pick & Pudding Pop murders. I will always be thankful for that. Her execution, not the letters. The letters were a real downer and full of bizarre accusations. But just because some
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it wasn’t me Jonathan Grossmalerman on the ridiculous struggles involved in proving a painting you painted isn’t yours
Courtesy the artist
ArtReview
prisoner writes me countless delusional letters that make outrageous claims – like that I told her that her art was ‘good’ and that she showed ‘enormous potential’ and that I would ‘love her unconditionally and forever’ and that she had a ‘hauntingly beautiful vagina’, and then went and ‘put a baby in her’ – I mean, that still doesn’t make me the author of that damned painting! On the other hand, it does make me an enthusiastic supporter of capital punishment. Yes, I know… to someone on the outside, it probably seems curious that I was mainly a painter of geometric abstraction before heading to the Tacoma State Women’s Correctional Facility™. And yes… if under oath, I would freely admit to painting vaginas with a singleminded ferocity ever since regaining consciousness in the prison parking lot a full 16 days after first arriving. But that still doesn't make it my painting! Does it? Does it? I mean… if it is my painting, which I am absolutely not admitting to, why would it be so terribly painted? After all, I’ve made other paintings in a fugue state and they looked fine. No, this one is crude and ham-fisted, and the colour palette is really terrible! Like it’s been painted with scraps of food and condiments! Sure… I grant you… maybe there’s a je ne çe quio there that hints at greater things, and when looked at out of the corner of your eye, it might have a curious charm and may bear a passing resemblance to a real Grossmalerman painting. But it’s not! I can’t stress that enough. Is it in the realm of the possible, you ask, that Darlene possessed the ur-vagina that has haunted me all these years, hovering in my dreams there, just out of reach? Or had the strength of vision to suggest I abandon geometric abstraction for something more palpable? Yes! Or even that she inspired me with her own desperate little paintings of vaginas? And that, once out of the confines of prison, I took her basic concept as my own, knowing I was safe from her, which would explain my relief at her execution by lethal injection? Indubitably! But that is also to suggest I owe my career to a criminally psychotic maniac! I mean, how realistic is that?? Anyway, it still doesn’t make it my painting.
Alan Cristea Gallery
Vicken Parsons: Iris
43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG +44 (0)20 7439 1866 info@alancristea.com www.alancristea.com
24 November 2016 – 7 January 2017
Great Critics and Their Ideas No 51
Eva Hesse on assholes and existentialists Interview by
Matthew Collings
In a career lasting barely ten years, the German-born sculptor Eva Hesse made a great impact on New York art through her innovative use of materials such as latex and forms that are at once highly abstract and erotically suggestive. She died in 1970 at the age of thirty-four.
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ARTREVIEW What did you think of the documentary movie about you that came out recently? EVA HESSE I couldn’t watch it. AR Too moving? EH No – too consumerist. I watched the trailer and read the PR. That was enough. The PR says my sculpture ‘helped establish the postminimalism movement’. Art history gives that name to the kind of work I did, that’s all. AR What’s the difference?
could hold them, put the palm of your hand and your fingers over them; a hump, a swelling, not just a circle or a sphere. A tube, not just a line. Or a whole tangle of tubes stretched across a room, not just a scribble on a canvas. A washy surface could be a tangible thing, transparent, but you could hold it, an object. A plane could curve round and its outer edges meet, and that plane, formerly a piece of paper, say, that you painted and drew on, became a tangible object in itself, with its own thickness. But it’s transparent or partly so: you can see light inside it
EH Artists don’t sit around thinking how to make a brand of their own selves. Art culture these days is about museums and institutions whipping up enthusiasm as if they’re selling a product. It’s a whipping-up that’s not seen for what it is, a necessary shallowness. After all, selling is a necessity: enterprise, making a living – no one’s complaining about that. But somehow it’s almost encouraged to be thought of as the primary aim and achievement now. How do you get a successful brand? And I feel I worked at my stuff and experimented, and had a set of enquiries, and they weren’t anything to do with whipping up enthusiasm among a bunch of assholes that want to be entertained. I was interested in what I saw around me that artists were doing, and my personal sense of how all that related to the entire history of art. AR What kind of art would you say you did, then, in those terms? EH What I was just talking about?
AR In the 1960s, did you think about the Abstract Expressionists? EH Yes, like others I knew, we saw those paintings and wanted to express them in real space. I think it’s common, that way in which art finds something to do from art. A lot of art today – I mean this period we’re talking in, 2016 – a lot of it is clearly redoing Modernism. Take Helen Marten in the Turner Prize, the strong one in the show. You see paintings redone as objects. Modernist abstract painting, the aspect of it where you’re really looking at proposals about formal relationships and divisions of the canvas, and colours being placed in certain proportions and with certain harmonies or disharmonies in a dynamic balance – she’s testing it. The objects she presents could be anything. The one in the show I most liked was like a bug or pod, or organic in some way, infinitely subdivided, with cool Cubist colour; it was a Le Corbusier redone; or Synthetic Cubism and its general 1920s and 30s international fallout, distilled into this physical thing. Just as Serra’s giant rusted steel panels are the little planes in a Suprematist composition by Malevich – redone so big they would kill you if they fell on you. AR What about all the Jewishness, though, and your grandparents being killed by the Nazis, and feminism, and dying young, and eroticism, and not being like Minimalism, cold and sterile, but human and disturbing?
AR Yes. EH Kind of emerging from painting. The forms in paintings had some interest for me, and I pursued it. How do you lay things out, how do you contain them and, plus, what are they – as in, what are they made of and what are they doing? I could follow up these problems and questions by experimenting with materials in the way that I did in fact experiment. A grey wash of ink, a compass-drawn circle, a rectangular grid, a particular rectangle to place it all in – and then, more and more, the individual elements being tested, maybe expanded, distended, swollen, cut down or distilled; or monochrome exchanged for a slight colouring: ‘off’ colours. Shapes becoming physical: you
seen. Pollock makes a great surface not because of depression and car crashes or his psychoanalysis and Jungian symbols, but ultimately because of the breathing surfaces of the Impressionists.
and reflected off it. The plane becomes so distorted that it’s unrecognisable almost. I think that’s what often happens with art. There are certain rules and beliefs operating, and artists test them. Sometimes the testing results in a new look, and the relationship to ideas in art that the new look has is forgotten; it can’t be above Work by Helen Marten (installation view, Turner Prize 2016, Tate Britain, London). Photo: Joe Humphrys. Courtesy Tate Photography facing page Eva Hesse. © Manfred Tischer Archives, Düsseldorf
November 2016
EH What about it? AR Well, you can’t just say it’s all shapes and colours. EH I think the disappointment at art only being shapes and colours is misplaced. There’s nothing ‘only’ about it, really. Books are all words. Films are all acting. Music is all notes. Life is all, you know, being born and then, later on, dying. I mean, have some imagination. The hysteria nowadays about all the reasons to love art has got nothing to do with anything except pandering to morons and babies, and an audience that’s fundamentally distracted.
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That the artworld itself, with its bullshit-dishing curators, like Hans Ulrich Obrist, is no different, in the narratives of significance it totally mendaciously whips up, to the idiots outside the artworld, with their brains filled with advertising, is a development tediously alike to what had already been going on for ages in 1970, when I died of brain cancer. AR Do you like Amy Sillman? EH Yes, in a way. AR How do you mean? EH I don’t want to promote anyone, it’s sick. AR Well, OK, how would you describe what is happening in her paintings where there are, say, organic shapes, improvisation and references to the human body – and she’s a woman? EH I don’t see the need to mention her gender, since there is nothing in the work that could be said to speak of it. AR Feminine colour? EH Well, that’s not a real concept. But yes, that’s closer actually: the stereotype of a pretty kind of colour often associated with the feminine does seem to be experimented with by her. AR So, then...? EH Sillman’s paintings are ideas about colour textures and formal divisions, plus fragments and hints of cartoon figuration, and she’s often praised as an artist responding to Philip Guston. The Guston connection is about the look he was known for when he was still considered an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s and 60s: a blurry indeterminacy that has a sense of imminent picturing – a picturing that’s about to happen – which is then still there when the picturing really does happen, starting in the late 1960s: that is, the picturing he eventually turned to is pregnant with indeterminacy still, it’s just that there’s a different balance. Sillman is rather a magnificent judge of colour balances and harmonies, and a mistress of animated colour
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areas and transitions. The colour range, the personality of the colour, is very different to Guston, and those that praise her for her Guston associations ought to realise the difference between them on that level. But those people aren’t interested in colour anyway, but mystical greatness. And praising Sillman for being on a continuum with Guston is all about mysticism. Whether the praising is accurate or not doesn’t take away from her achievement. It’s a measure of anyone’s genuine success that they will be praised rightly and wrongly just as much. But mostly wrongly simply because most of us aren’t careful processors of ideas and thoughts. I don’t know of any accurate praise for Sillman that exists at the moment, so I’m glad to have contributed some for the record at last, in this interview with you.
new in 2016 to hear about them being finally revered when in Abstract Expressionism’s heyday they weren’t. But it’s problematic because neither of them are really frontrunners. They don’t have the combination of a singular identifying individual format, and a plausibly original way of manipulating the medium, that makes a frontrunner. So complaints that are often heard about Abstract Expressionism being a macho movement, while meaningless in any deep sense, are real enough in the sense that the frontrunners were, as it happens, men.
AR Existentialists or aesthetes?
AR Did you ever smoke a bong?
EH This opposition probably doesn’t have any real meaning. Existentialism is concerned with the void, but you can’t be an existentialist as an artist in an artistic void. Logically there must be some art you’re orienting your existentialism in the direction of.
EH Yeah.
AR Man or woman? EH Even in 1970 it was common to hear that Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell ought to be recognised as equal to the much more famous male Abstract Expressionists. It’s nothing
‘I think the disappointment at art only being shapes and colours is misplaced. There’s nothing ‘only’ about it, really. Books are all words. Films are all acting. Music is all notes. Life is all, you know, being born and then, later on, dying. I mean, have some imagination. The hysteria nowadays about all the reasons to love art has got nothing to do with anything except pandering to morons and babies, and an audience that’s fundamentally distracted’
ArtReview
AR Abstract values or inner being? EH I think art is a total thing, a total person making a contribution. It is an essence, a soul. In my inner soul, art and life are inseparable.
AR Are you smoking one now? EH Come on, you know I am. AR Did you get ideas from being stoned? EH No, from art and from materials and methods that were available in my milieu, which was largely one of sculptors, but also a few painters, mostly minimalists, protominimalists and what became known later as postminimalists. And I worked in a disused textile factory once, in Germany, where there were some interesting machine parts and tools that influenced me. AR Death? EH Well, looking back I can honestly say it’s a relief to have died young. I’d hate to have gone on living if it meant becoming like my friend Agnes Martin when she was old, who could talk about nothing but herself. NEXT MONTH Nineteenth-century formalist art historian Alois Riegl on artistic will and Frieze-week parties
DERRICK ADAMS FLOAT 18 November - 17 December 2016 Derrick Adams now represented by Vigo Gallery
Vigo 21 Dering Street London W1S 1AL +44 (0) 207 493 3492 vigogallery.com #vigogallery
AUTUMN HIGHLIGHTS UNTIL 27 OCTOBER
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20TH EDITION
10.13 NOV 2016 GRAND PALAIS With the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and Communication
Organised by
With the support of
Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2016
Selected by Anya Gallaccio, Alan Kane and Haroon Mirza Institute of Contemporary Arts The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH ica.org.uk 23 November 2016 – 22 January 2017 newcontemporaries.org.uk info@newcontemporaries.org.uk @NewContemps New Contemporaries @newcontemps
AmN ONGOING series of micro oil paintings by ARTISTS YOKE AND ZOOM
29 October- 17 December 2016
TATE MODERN 14 S E P 2016 – 8 J A N 2017
Manual Labours / Sarah Browne Report to an Academy 29 October- 17th December 2016 Followed by graduate artist in residence: Letty Noonan in January 2017
THE E Y E XHIBITION
WIFREDO L AM
The EY Tate Arts Partnership
Wifredo Lam Horse-Headed Woman 1950 The Rudman Trust © SDO Wifredo Lam Photo: Joaquín Cortés y Joaquín Lores, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
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C H w o E CK N o t
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Alberto Biasi · Alighiero Boetti · Agostino Bonalumi · Enrico Castellani · Tony Cragg · Piero Dorazio · Tano Festa · Lucio Fontana · Joseph Kosuth · Heinz Mack · Giulio Paolini · Jesús-Rafael Soto · Grazia Varisco Curated by Ilaria Bignotti
21.09 — 30.11 2016
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U�TITLED, Miami Beach, Nov 30, Dec 1,2,3,4, 2016.
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U�TITLED, San Francisco, Jan 13,14,15, 2017.
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Petra Bauer & SCOT-PEP Nothing about us without us Part of Constellations Programme, a series of research based, off-site commissions that aim to bring people together to develop ideas and partnerships.
www.collectivegallery.net Nothing about us without us, test shoot, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, SCOT-PEP and HER Films.
Further information 01227 827272 admissions@kent.ac.uk www.kent.ac.uk/arts
this is a political (painting)
Kajsa Dahlberg, A K Dolven, VALIE EXPORT, Claire Fontaine and Alexandra Pirici
VALIE EXPORT: still from BODY TAPE (1970). © Kontakt. Die Kunstsammlung der Erste Group und ERSTE Stiftung
Kunsthall Trondheim Inaugural exhibition 20.10 2016 – 26.2 2017
Kongens gate 2, 7011 Trondheim, Norway www.kunsthalltrondheim.no
Letizia Zombory is a daring colourist, a narrator who suspends between the real world and a fairy tale. She is a Dutch painter (who now lives and works in Italy), who in her paintings balances on the edge of dreams, abandons realistic figuration and perspective and has its own poetic and personal vision that ignores the natural color, the laws of gravity and the traditional ways of dealing with space. Her works show us that the invisible world can become visible thanks to the magic of colours that sing and dance in absolute freedom. The universe that she represents is not realistic but doesn’t deviate so much from reality. The creatures that soar in her paintings bring the world of everyday happiness and sweetness of poetry, as well as a certain degree of velvety irony and are infused in the magical value of myth. Zombory´s world is colored, as if seen through the window of a Gothic church, her poetic world feeds on a fantasy, which refers to childhood innocence and fairy tales, the colour refers to the Fauves. The simplicity of form connects to Primitivism, the theme of the dreams is surrealist, the scenes and fantasies are popular, her metaphysical figures transform the chronicle, according to the simultaneity of a dream. Prof. GIAMPAOLO TROTTA.
For more information please visit: www.letiziazombory.com
left: Travelling through time 150 x 100 cm top: Unfair duel 2000 years ago in Rome 100 x 150 cm right: Once upon an evening in Venice 40 x 80 cm
THE INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR FOR CONTEMPORARY OBJECTS 2–6.2.2017 SAATCHI GALLERY LONDON For more information and early ticket discount visit collect17.org.uk
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Grand Palais 30th March - 2nd April 2017 Africa guest of honour www.artparis.com
FOCUSING ON THE MIDDLE EAST
Ghoncheh, 2016. Chromogenic print mounted on Dibond, 90 x 135 cm
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Ferens Art Gallery highlights: Hull,UK City of Culture,2017 Pietro Lorenzetti: Siena to Hull, a Masterpiece Revealed Supported by the National Gallery January – April 2017
Pietro Lorenzetti’s stunning panel painting, Christ between Saints Paul and Peter c.1320, is unveiled for the first time following its acquisition by the Ferens Art Gallery in 2013. Having undergone extensive conservation treatment and research at the National Gallery, London, the panel reveals the dazzling world of early 14th-century Sienese painting. The exhibition places the panel in context, and is the outcome of the National Gallery Curatorial Traineeship with Art Fund support and the assistance of the Vivmar Foundation. The panel was acquired with support from the Ferens Endowment Fund and John Bradshaw Bequest, the Heritage Lottery Fund and Art Fund.
Masterpieces in Focus from the Royal Collection: Rembrandt 1 April – 28 August 2017
An established partnership with Royal Collection Trust has secured the loan of a magnificent standalone masterpiece by Rembrandt van Rijn which is the first ever painting by the artist to visit the city. The Ship Builder and his Wife, 1633, draws attention to Hull’s historic trading links and maritime history. It will be displayed alongside British Library loans and items drawn from the permanent collection exploring the rumour that Rembrandt may even have lived in Hull for a few months while escaping his creditors in Amsterdam.
Ron Mueck Part of ARTIST ROOMS On Tour 22 April – 13 August 2017
Australian-born Ron Mueck is widely recognised for his striking sculptures, which replicate the human figure at exaggerated or reduced scale, but always in the most painstaking detail. His incredibly life-like works have been exhibited internationally and captivate the public wherever they are shown. ARTIST ROOMS gives young people the chance to explore works by leading artists, and this exhibition has been developed with Future Ferens, the gallery’s volunteer group of 18-25 year olds. It features two sculptures from the ARTIST ROOMS collection: Wild Man, 2005 and Spooning Couple, 2005, alongside key works from other UK collections. The ARTIST ROOMS collection of international modern and contemporary art is owned by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the public, and was established through the generosity of Anthony d’Offay through the d’Offay donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, and the Scottish and British Governments. ARTIST ROOMS on Tour shares the collection with millions of visitors to museums and galleries around the UK, and Ferens Art Gallery is the Lead Associate partner for ARTIST ROOMS On Tour during 2017-19, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Art Fund and the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Ferens Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Square, Hull, HU1 3RA FREE ENTRY www.hcandl.co.uk/ferens
@HullFerens #Lorenzetti #RembrandtinHull #MueckinHull
Pietro Lorenzetti, Christ between Saints Paul and Peter, c.1320 © Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Museums
@ferensartgallery
Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016
Facebook.com/HullMuseums Hull Museums
Ron Mueck, Wild Man 2005. ARTIST ROOMS National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Acquired jointly through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008 © Ron Mueck
JIN SHA Disappearred in the mirror
金沙
鏡花·蝕語 November 19th - December 30th, 2016 Opening : November 19th, 2016 (Saturday) 15 : 00 – 18 : 00 Duration : November 19th - December 30th, 2016
Venue: No.54 Caochangdi (old airport road), Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015, China www. amyligallery.com
Palexpo / 26 – 29.01.2017 artgeneve.ch
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Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 28 – 30.04.2017 artmontecarlo.ch
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Trevor Paglen Interview by Oliver Basciano
For the American artist, art is about making invisible structures visible, the better for viewers to grasp the operations of the world around them 92
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Incorporating his academic background as a geographer, and the skills of an investigative reporter, Trevor Paglen is an American artist whose work has sought to expose the often hidden physical apparatus and architecture that governments and, increasingly, private companies employ to monitor and control the public. His rich large-format photographs tend to be the result of a long process of research: in 2015 he learned to dive in order to find and document the points where transatlantic cables that form the Internet enter the US, secret infrastructure hubs that the NSA have been known to tap. In 2013 he hired a helicopter to photograph American spy stations in the US and overseas. He is involved in The Intercept, the website set up in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, and he contributed to Citizenfour (2014), Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary on Edward Snowden. This year he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. For this issue he produced an artist’s project that graces both the cover of the magazine and six interior pages. ArtReview Is it important for art to stand up to power? Trevor Paglen That’s not the point, but that can be an effect of it. What I want out of art, and the kind of art that excites me, are the things that help you see the moment in history that you’re living in. So, in the effort to do that, sometimes you end up in an adversarial relationship to power through that project, and I think that one should not shirk away from it. AR Obviously you have worked with people like Laura Poitras, people who are artists but who would also be viewed as activists. What’s the line between what you do and activism, or journalistic activism? TP I guess there’s a practical aspect to that in the sense that most activists that I know, when they go to work they do policy or legal or advocacy work. That’s not what I do when I go to work. When I go to work I think about colour. I’m thinking about how the art is engaging with the world, I’m developing metaphors, ways of seeing, hopefully, calling attention to things. All of this is inherently political, however. Political in the sense that you’re proposing to the society that we pay attention to one thing over another, which is a mode of political determination. I think a lot of artists are interested in thinking about how one could imagine a different world, or how one could just simply learn how to understand the world that one lives in, and I think that that’s a project that people in many disciplines are concerned with. Whether
it’s activism or anthropology or physical science or geomorphology, and all of those disciplines, inevitably, intersect with politics. If you’re doing anthropology, that’s inherently political. If you’re doing geomorphology and you’re thinking about natural resources somewhere, oil and what effect humans have on the earth’s surface, that’s also obviously political. AR You studied geography, not art, and there’s a belief that because science is empirical, it’s apolitical. Now, that’s not true, right? TP That’s not true. Nobody actually thinks that. I mean, maybe that’s an image in the public’s mind, but, you know, scientists work on stuff that they’re funded to study, and that’s always political. AR That’s the same for artists: the art that we get to see is the stuff that is pushed through by funding – in a way the Power 100 is an attempt to shine a light on that and on the decision-makers.
‘I don’t think that you can exit the power system. Power flows through everything. We’re not complicit with it, we’re features of power. We’re products of power. We can’t decide to not be a part of it. Power is what we’re made of. Power is relations with other people, trying to do things in the world’ TP That’s the politics of visibility. AR When art is used as a symbol of capitalistic power, that’s pretty simple. Rich person wants to buy a painting. He or she buys a painting. Done. However, art is also tied up into things like state power: winning awards and representing countries; you’re invited to travel, to do museum shows. Do you worry about participation in this power system, given that your work looks at power? TP I don’t think that you can exit the power system. There’s literally no place in society where you can stand and imagine that you’ve removed yourself from those kinds of power relationships, whether they’re economic or state forms of power. Instead I think of it as more about the opportunities to contribute facing page Untitled (Predators; Indian Springs, NV), 2010, c-print, 152 × 122 cm
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to a conversation about power, about culture, about the state of the world and the future of it. I guess I don’t think of it in such a blackand-white way – that you’re either complicit or you’re not – that’s not how power works. Power flows through everything. We’re not complicit with it, we’re features of power. We’re products of power. We can’t decide to not be a part of it. Power is what we’re made of. Power is relations with other people, trying to do things in the world. So, for me, having access to audiences is a way to suggest that maybe we should be paying attention to one thing or another. AR Is there a chance the art object – the thing in a room – could break free? TP I’m not sure that the object has that power either, but I do think that it can create different relations. One can be very cynical about the art market, and one is usually correct in that cynicism. The art market will certainly validate not what’s the greatest contribution to the culture but what’s the greatest contribution to the market. On the other hand, I think that the art market isn’t that efficient, and weirdly, when you look at what shakes out at the end of the day, often it is the good art. AR It’s interesting that you allude to an inefficiency, because, as an industry, art has barely embraced technology. It’s weirdly old-fashioned and clunky. TP That fits with the luxury-goods market, though. When you look at high-end goods, they’re inefficient, they’re handmade for the most part, they’re custom-tailored. So that part I get. I guess what I mean by inefficiency is a little bit more like, in the long run, art isn’t collectors and auction houses, it’s art historians, critics, writers and other cultural producers. For the most part, art historians don’t care, or even know what auction prices are. Those are the kind of inefficiencies I mean. AR You mentioned the idea of ‘drawing attention’. One thing to say about your work is that it’s very beautiful. You look at a photograph like National Security Agency Surveillance Base, Bude, Cornwall, UK [2014] and it’s a beautiful picture of a beautiful place, but one with very a scary subject. TP I think that a lot of us secretly want to live in a world in which bad things are ugly and good things are beautiful. That would make the world a lot simpler, but that’s not the way it works. So I play with that a lot in the work that I do – that tension between aesthetics and power. AR A lot of the stuff you photograph also wants to be either technologically or politically invisible – surveillance bases, drones, the hard infrastructure of the
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National Security Agency Surveillance Base, Bude, Cornwall, UK, 2014, c-print, 122 × 163 cm
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NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Marseille, France (detail), 2015, c-print; map, 122 × 170cm.
November 2016
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National Security Agency, Ft. Meade, Maryland; National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Virginia; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Springfield, Virginia (detail), 2014, three c-prints, 46 × 69 cm each
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Large Hangars and Fuel Storage; Tonopah Test Range, NV; Distance approx. 18 miles; 10:44 am, 2005, c-print, 76 × 91 cm
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Circles (still), 2015, video, 12 min
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Internet – often both. Given all this attention to tech, do you think you could have made this work say ten or 20 years ago? TP Yes, absolutely, similar work could have been made during the 1960s, and people did, but when we’re looking at architectures of data mining and data collection, whether that’s state powers like GCHQ or the NSA or – I actually think more importantly – the Standard Oils of the Internet age in the form of the Googles, the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, these are already, and are in the short-term future, radically changing the ways in which societies work, and the ways in which de facto rights and privileges are allocated. That has huge implications for democracy, equality, freedom and these kinds of things. So I think it’s absolutely crucial to spend some time trying to understand them, and they’re very poorly understood from a cultural perspective, or from a political perspective, quite frankly.
modulated in even smaller increments than a Fordist model could accommodate. The workers bear all the risk of owning the means of production. I’m just trying to put this in classical terms, you know. AR There’s a total break that Marx could never have predicted. You reminded me of Percolata, a startup that basically uses a sort of Uber principle on behalf to the retail industry – Uniqlo and the like – in which an algorithm analyses employee behaviour in relation to profitability. The algorithm will determine that ‘if Fred works with Wilma sales go up, but they suffer if he’s partnered with Barney’. From this the algorithm spits out a roster, diminishing the need for a manager.
AR We’re speaking over Skype for free, and I have no idea what the business model is. I just assume data collection: presumably they follow where we are, know exactly who we’re both talking to, but I still don’t know exactly how they monetise that. I mean, presumably they must do, but what is more interesting is my ignorance. TP When you look at tech, the business model today isn’t advertising, it’s venture capital, right? So if you look at a company like Uber, their business model actually isn’t making money, it’s raising capital. That’s today. The advertising is a default thing to do with the Internet marketing, trying to get you to buy some Crocs or whatever. Everybody knows that that’s not a sustainable means of making money on the Internet. So what the next version of that is – and this is already starting to happen – is that you need to get into finance, insurance, credit, labour. With a company like Uber, you see the labour part. What they’ve managed to do is to develop a model in which the labourers are freelance contractors whose time can be
TP Things like this are a real revolution in productivity and, correspondingly, extracted profit. Or take a company like Fitbit. They sell you this thing, it helps you exercise or whatever, but the real model is to sell that information to health insurance companies that can modulate your insurance premiums based on them. The same is true of Facebook and Google, all these sorts of companies. above LACROSSE/ONYX V Radar Imaging Reconnaissance Satellite Crossing the Disk of the Moon (USA 182), 2007, c-print, 89 × 89 cm all images Courtesy the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco
November 2016
The medium-term future of that is to extract money out of you based on a microanalysis of your beta data signature in all kinds of ways. What that adds up to is a society in which people are, in a very real sense, given very different rights within society. These are the kinds of things I’m thinking about now. AR This is a slight shift, though – your work has, at least to date, been about state power. Tell me a little bit about the project for this issue of ArtReview. The badges you made for the photographs, for example – they are like military badges. TP I like making badges. I make badges for all kinds of different projects. It came out of a book project called I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me [2007], and a series of artworks related to that. That was about collecting military patches that were made for projects and programmes that ‘didn’t exist’, for secret projects. It struck me as a really interesting strand of visual culture. How do you represent that which must not be represented? Which presents an interesting art historical question too – I mean, this is an old question going back thousands of years. Then what you also have is a bit of an unmediated glimpse into that culture of secret state power. In that visual language you often see a self-reflexivity that wouldn’t be made publicly. We all know this from our own jobs. I’m sure within ArtReview there are some very candid conversations about how power works in the artworld that you couldn’t publish, but internally you would make jokes about it. So the same is true of the NSA and the like, where internally they would be, very selfconsciously, talking about themselves as the bad guys. So for the magazine I was imagining what this might look like for the artworld: what if the artworld made uniform patches that weren’t for public consumption but which actually gave you a glimpse into its unspoken id? ar
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Introduction If art is about making things visible, then the Power 100 is about revealing who decides what (kind of) art is made visible. It seeks to uncover the network of interests behind the often undiscussed rhythms of generally accepted ‘good taste’ in art and its structures. It’s an occasion for a magazine such as this one to review the extent to which it follows the issues suggested to it by blockbuster art exhibitions and equally blockbusting PR budgets. And to engage in the idea that the audience for art is not a stupefied mass but rather a self-reflexive public. It’s also an opportunity for ArtReview to consider how the artworld operates and what those operations might tell us about the world that surrounds us. Since its founding in 1949, during the postwar era of social and physical reconstruction in Europe, ArtReview has been concerned with advocating the positive role that art can play in the building of society. At the time, that mission was one that might broadly be described as optimistic, but not unrealistic. In the no-less-turbulent moment of now, we’re sometimes left wondering how realistic these beliefs really are. Which makes the advocacy of the benefits of art all the more urgent (to borrow the catchphrase of this year’s most powerful artworld player). ArtReview’s foundational beliefs lie at the core of everything it does and provide the rationale behind the Power 100 project in particular. For this issue, however, we set advocacy aside. At ArtReview we know how we would like the world of art to be – but is that really how it is? Crucially, the Power 100 is not about ArtReview’s likes or ArtReview’s taste; it’s not even about who’s popular or not. Power doesn’t care for these things. In particular, it’s not about confusing popularity with value, although for art to have a value it needs on some level to engage an audience. And, to be sure, how the world values art (monetarily, aesthetically, instrumentally) is a key issue. One that can mean that, at times, amid the network the Power 100 describes, it might be dealers who hold the upper hand; at others it’s artists and curators; and sometimes even critics and thinkers. The Power 100 aims to reflect current debates over value, but crucially (and hardest of all) not directly asserting one particular measurement of value. Which, in turn, creates the controversies and strong opinions that often swirl around the list upon its release. However, the criteria we use to evaluate the people of art power are clear: the person should have been active within the past 12 months; their influence is to be judged on an international rather than a local level; this influence should extend to the kind of art being produced today; and it should be an influence on the idea of art that persists in society at large. These criteria are applied by a panel of 20 people in different geographical regions who suggest and then argue for the most powerful influences on the contemporary art that surrounds them. Like much in life, the real debate is a battle of opinion as much as fact. And, in this globalised artworld, in which old ideas of centres and peripheries are harder and harder genuinely to apply, the list will necessarily privilege those power players whose influence has something of a global spread. In general, art accrues value over time: time to think, time to digest, time to respond, time to assess, time to weigh and time to measure. But time is something contemporaneity doesn’t have much patience for. Everything is in the moment, or its contemporaneity is lost. So how is the value of contemporary art set, within that framework? For ArtReview, it’s art that tells something about the world around us that we’ve overlooked, and that perhaps speculates on what directions that world can or will follow. The last, of course, can only be valued over time. The Power 100, then, is a provisional assessment, one that needs to be retested and restated year after year. To be in the now is to be in a state of flux. ArtReview
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1 Hans Ulrich Obrist
Museum Director Swiss Last Year 4 (with Julia Peyton-Jones) Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director (he had a title change this summer, following the departure of long-serving director Julia Peyton-Jones) of the Serpentine Galleries, a midsize kunsthalle-type institution in one of London’s Royal Parks. But that tells you very little about what it is this Swiss curator actually does. When Obrist last topped this list, in 2009, we quoted the opening point of the curatorial statement from his Beijing Mini-Marathon of ideas: ‘Don’t stop. We never stop.’ And he singularly has not. He is famous for ignoring traditional constraints of both time (he works near constantly and famously founded the Brutally Early Club, an open-to-all discussion group that meets at 6.30am) and geographic place (he is in perpetual motion, giving talks and doing interviews at nearly every significant art event around the globe), and a single institution could never hope to house the full breadth of his activities. ‘My favourite cultural venue is actually an imaginary construct – it’s the unrealised Fun Palace by the theatre director Joan Littlewood and the architect Cedric Price, who in the 60s came up with this idea of a cultural centre bringing together all artistic disciplines, removing all silos,’ he told The Guardian in its latest profile of the great man. And the imaginary lies at the core of Obrist’s grand project, founded on a belief in the international and interdisciplinary preservation and exchange of ideas (much more perhaps than in the physical information of an artwork in and of itself). His Interview Project, constituting thousands of hours of recorded interviews with artists, architects and significant figures from the worlds of science, literature, philosophy and almost every other discipline you could imagine constitutes an ever-growing archive of the ideas of our times, preserved for eternity and released in a library of books (this year saw the appearance of Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects – 19 of Obrist’s favourite interviews). Mobile and transferrable, Obrist’s projects are generally centred on the personalities (as, again, opposed to artworks) that nowadays constitute what we generally refer to as the ‘artworld’. Within all that, Obrist has become a celebrity both inside and outside the world of art. More than that, Obrist’s project is perfectly suited to a globalised, networked age, with Instagram (he told The Guardian recently that he can’t live without it, and posts the image of a note handwritten by the people he interviews or encounters every day as a protest against the disappearance of handwriting), Twitter and Periscope now tools
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for broadcast and transmission that are almost more important to him than gallery spaces. This switch from object to idea also lies behind do it, an exhibition concept Obrist developed in 1993, following a conversation (naturally) with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, in which artists submit ‘scores’ or written instructions. Flexible and open-ended, iterations of do it also present artworks themselves as conversations (between instructor and instructed) and have taken place at over 50 venues – currently the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey and Galerija Umjetnina in Split, Croatia. ‘My grandad was a sales rep for Colman’s Mustard. I expect today he would have to say he was a mustard plant compound retail opportunity curator!’ wrote comedian Stewart Lee in an article mocking the ubiquity and consequent meaninglessness of the description ‘curator’ in The Guardian this March. It was illustrated by a portrait of Obrist, who ‘wrote the book on “curating”, literally’ (2015’s Ways of Curating, following on from 2008’s A Brief History of Curating – with Daniel Birnbaum and Christophe Cherix). There’s no doubt too that Obrist’s championing of curating as an open-ended structure has contributed to the universality of its use, just as much as his archiving of discussions with artists about their thoughts and intentions (privileged over what they do or make, although Obrist is an enabler when it comes to that as well) has coincided with a greater focus on intentionality in everything from museum captions to press releases and reviews. Artists, however, remain at the centre of his work, and Obrist’s support for and ability to connect people has been crucial to the success of many. Artworks may circulate within the art market, but thanks to Obrist, and his many disciples and collaborators, artistic ideas circulate within the world at large. He is still a whirlwind unto himself, as an international networker, connector and purveyor of the ‘urgent’. While Yana Peel has joined HUO as CEO of the Serpentine, and the Hyde Park space has in the past year shown both the paintings of early-twentieth-century Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint and young New York artist Rachel Rose, the Swiss curator continues to hop around the globe. The 89plus project, which Obrist cofounded with Simon Castets in 2013, has in the past year resulted in exhibitions in Paris and Zürich, as well as forming part of Obrist’s input as one of the artistic directors of the Shanghai Project. His projects of the annual marathon talks and collecting interviews with artists continue, and if one thing’s for certain, HUO won’t be sitting still for long.
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1 Photo: Roe Ethridge
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2 Adam Szymczyk Curator Polish Last Year 16 sees Athens and Kassel as two locations emblematic of the current extreme and polarised states of Europe, both with radically different economic and social conditions. Amidst our contemporary global politics, Szymczyk has cited as points of criticality Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia, following the annexation of Crimea and war in Eastern Ukraine, which ‘begets specters of the Cold War’; Greece’s leftwing government’s austerity measures; extremism being ‘organized around the fear of the “other”, conflating local Muslims and new refugees with terrorists’; and the continuing conflict in Syria, at an ‘all-too-conceivable stalemate’. The platform of the Documenta 14 website has been made available to the anonymous Syrian filmmaking collective Abounaddara, and every Friday a new film of theirs is released under the umbrella term ‘emergency cinema’.
3 Iwan & Manuela Wirth Gallerists Swiss Last Year 1 If last year was all about pulling on the wellies and trekking down to the southwest of England to Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the gallery’s countryside art centre, then in 2016 the couple’s attentions were directed towards the less bucolic environs of Los Angeles. Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, a partnership with former MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, opened in March with Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016 spread across the 2,200sqm exhibition space (the rest of the converted industrial space – 9,300sqm in total – houses a bookshop, a gallery space for Hauser & Wirth’s publishing outfit and a restaurant called Manuela). Women have dominated the exhibition programme since, with solo shows for Maria Lassnig and Isa Genzken (as well as a rehang of Schwitters Miró Arp, an exhibition originally staged at Hauser & Wirth Zürich during the Dada
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centenary celebrations in Switzerland this summer). This museumlike approach – the historic shows, the partnering with Schimmel, the educational programme (the cafés!) – has won them admirers, not least among the heirs of various canonical artists. This year Hauser & Wirth announced representation of two more major estates: those of Arshile Gorky and Lygia Pape (a selection of whose greatest hits they presented in one of the London spaces this autumn). Next year gallery artists Mark Bradford and Phyllida Barlow will be occupying the American and British pavilions at the Venice Biennale, and later this year the gallery temporarily takes over the former Dia Art Foundation building in New York (retaining its East 69th Street space but replacing West 18th Street) while building an equally vast new gallery next door, set to open in 2018.
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2 Photo: Gina Folly 3 Photo: John Phillips / Getty
Polish curator Adam Szymczyk vaults further up the list as artistic director of Documenta 14, which creeps ever closer, opening in 2017. With his teams working across two cities, in Athens and Documenta’s hometown of Kassel (the first splitting of venues in the history of the celebrated quinquennial art exhibition), its temporary takeover of the Athens-based journal South as a State of Mind has stated the will for critical inquiry to be ‘clearly driven by a sense of the political, social and ecological urgency of this historical moment’. And of course by a sense of geography, place and an interest in trying to inhabit the existing structures therein rather than rushing to replace them with something new. Inviting artists to develop new works, his politicised approach seeks ‘the possibility of working together towards scenarios that offer strategies against the dominant modes and modalities of passivity, control, terror’. Szymczyk
4 David Zwirner Gallerist German Last Year 3
4 Photo: Dirk Eusterbrock. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London 5 Photo: Hugo Glendinning
Having opened his first gallery outside New York (where he currently boasts two spaces) in London in 2012, Zwirner this year announced further expansion, with plans for a new 465sqm gallery to open mid-next year in Hong Kong, designed by Annabelle Selldorf (also responsible for his 1,800sqm New York gallery and the more than 900sqm in London). While all that is in the pipeline, it’s been the usual kind of year for the gallerist (that is a usual kind of year when you have the careers of Isa Genzken, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama and Luc Tuymans in your care, ie a good chunk of the artists you’ll find on this list). Nor is Zwirner content with that workload: this year the gallery announced worldwide representation of photographer William Eggleston and the Josef and Anni Albers
Foundation. The first show of Josef’s work takes place in November in New York, exploring the Bauhaus painter’s interest in the use of black, white and grey in his geometric abstraction. Earlier in the year, another gallery newbie, Sherrie Levine, whose representation was announced last year, exhibited a series of monochrome paintings on mahogany inspired by the palette of Renoir’s nudes, with every three canvases interspersed with a similarly hued Smeg fridge. Meanwhile Zwirner’s son, Lukas, has been steering the gallery’s publishing house in new directions, including the launch of a series republishing art historical or theoretical texts independent of the gallery’s programming, the first being Proust’s 1895 essay on Chardin and Rembrandt.
5 Nicholas Serota & Frances Morris Museum Directors British Last Year 5 / N ew It’s been quite a year for Tate director Nicholas Serota. In April he turned seventy and in June he celebrated the opening of Tate Modern’s new Herzog & de Meuron-designed Switch House building, to great attention and largely popular acclaim. Providing 60 percent more space and the opportunity to rehang the galleries, the addition put into practice Tate’s ongoing remit to show more women artists as well as more global artists. Of the 1,008 works acquired by Tate in 2015–16, 676 were by artists from outside the UK. Major exhibitions at Tate galleries by women artists during the same period included Marlene Dumas, Sonia Delaunay, Agnes Martin, Mona Hatoum and Barbara Hepworth. With new directors for Tate Modern (Frances Morris) and Tate Britain (Alex Farquharson) in place, and with his legacy secured,
it was no great surprise that in September, after nearly 30 years at the head of the institution, Serota announced he would be stepping down. Another long-term relationship with Tate also came to a close when oil and gas company BP announced that it would be ending its 26-year sponsorship deal with the institution. BP cited the ‘challenging business environment’, but that didn’t take away the victory of activist collective Liberate Tate, who had been protesting the institution’s association with the company since 2010. Liberate Tate is now refocusing its campaign on other BP-sponsored art institutions. Serota isn’t ready for retirement either. In February 2017 he’ll be taking over from Peter Bazalgette in the (albeit part-time) role of chair of Arts Council England.
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Gallerist American Last Year 6 How does the saying go? When Larry opens a door, someone closes a window? Perhaps that is what happened this past April when Damien Hirst returned to representation by Gagosian Gallery, only for Julian Schnabel to decide he’d had enough of the same and jump (back) to Pace. More likely there is just no megagallery large enough to fit those two Jupiter-sized egos. But it’s Jupiter-sized egos, or rather Jupitersized reputations, for Larry no matter what: Richard Serra and Sally Mann in New York and London; a debut for Anish Kapoor in Hong Kong; a big congratulatory profile in WSJ magazine (with photos by Roe Ethridge to boot); and a brand-new gallery (the 16th to be correct) in San Francisco, just across from the newly reopened SFMOMA. To prove he
can be down-to-earth, Gagosian offered a pop-up tattoo parlour at the New York Art Book Fair with designs by the likes of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Kim Gordon. He also lent his gallery and artists to Hillary Clinton this past September, hosting a benefit auction to raise funds for her campaign. But then there was a dispute (settled) with the Qatari royal family over ownership of a bust by Picasso; and that little $4.3 million settlement with New York State on some disputed sales taxes. Though it’s nothing to brag about, perhaps it’s fitting that the settlement of the latter is the largest the attorney general’s office had ever reached with an art gallery. Gagosian goes big, even when things don’t go well.
7 Hito Steyerl Artist German Last Year 18 No surprise that Hito Steyerl was given floorspace aplenty in this year’s Berlin Biennale: the tech-savvy generation of artists it spotlighted was weaned on her incisive e-flux essays interlacing digital technology and subjectivity, not to mention her increasingly elaborate art practice. It’s taken a moment for the Munich-born, Berlin-based Steyerl’s synthesis of lecture performance, writing and CGI-driven video to assume centrality, but this year she was ubiquitous: while her writing anatomised videogames and virtual simulations, she popped up in (inter alia) the São Paulo
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Biennial, MOCA Los Angeles (where her Factory of the Sun, 2015, a key piece in the last Venice Biennale, was reprised), Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía and Berlin’s Transmediale festival, where she was a keynote speaker. It made sense, given this swathe, that Steyerl was also nominated for the Artes Mundi prize. It’s equally indicative of her my-way-or-thehighway approach that, at the time of writing, the maker of How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) had just taken herself off its shortlist.
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6 Photo: Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery 7 Photo: Tobias Zielony. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
6 Larry Gagosian
8 Adam D. Weinberg Museum Director American Last Year 9
8 Courtesy Whitney Museum, New York 9 Photo: Spilios Gianakopoulos
By now Adam Weinberg has settled into his new $760m home – what the institution has taken to calling ‘the New Whitney’ – which opened just about 18 months ago on the most prime of prime real-estate in Manhattan. With a Frank Stella retrospective safely out of the way, and an experiment with Laura Poitras proving that all art, no matter how political, can be rendered passive and pliant within the museum’s walls, the Whitney is sitting pretty. A long-overdue Carmen Herrera retrospective is underway, and the museum is looking ahead to the first of its storied biennials to take place in the new building this spring.
Some 1.3 million people visited the Whitney in its first year, crushing the museum’s attendance projections and supposedly creating a bit of a problem with the Whitney’s $200,000 water bill, which went unpaid for a year because someone forgot to fill out the change-ofaddress form with the city, or some such. Weinberg surely had other things on his mind, like poaching David Breslin from the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston to serve as curator and director of the Whitney’s collection. Weinberg’s Whitney is an increasingly difficult place to say no to.
9 Wolfgang Tillmans Artist German Last Year 11 This year, thanks to Britain’s EU referendum, the politics inherent in Wolfgang Tillmans’s art transformed into full-blown activism. His pro-Remain, print-it-yourself poster campaign took the mobility that’s always underscored his project – photographs recontextualised in successive shows, images presented as unframed Xeroxes, globetrotting method – and gave it a sharp edge of urgency. The poster project, of course, took on a melancholy aspect after the votes were counted. But Tillmans
didn’t lack for distraction. Besides a typically eventful exhibition schedule (his eighth show with Maureen Paley, his 12th with Daniel Buchholz, a dozen group shows), he released his first record (surging techno with vocals), collaborated with acclaimed singer Frank Ocean, continued to run his Berlin space Between Bridges and is now prepping a 2017 show for Tate Modern. Tillmans may work with digital imagery rather than darkrooms these days, but he’s forever developing and enlarging.
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11 Beatrix Ruf Museum Director German Last Year 22
10 Ai Weiwei The past 12 months has seen Ai settle into life as an exile. Ai being Ai, however, living in Berlin and occupying a visiting professorship at the city’s Universität der Künste hasn’t meant an existence of quiet academia since the Chinese authorities returned his passport in 2015, but one typified by the media-grabbing activism for which the artist is renowned. Not that this is without its controversy, of course: eyes were raised when the artist posed as Alan Kurdi, the young refugee whose body washed up on the shore of a Turkish beach near Bodrum. Yet Ai’s refusal to let his fans forget this unfolding political and human tragedy has been far from superficial or fleeting (as anyone who has seen the artist’s Instagram posts of his many visits to refugee camps all along the Mediterranean coast can vouch for). Nor was Ai any less vocal when Chinese politics intervened in his inclusion in the inaugural Yinchuan Biennale (curated by Bose Krishnamachari) and his invitation was rescinded, or when Lego blocked Ai’s bulk order of its iconic bricks for an installation at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, worried that its toys would be used for ‘political statements’ (the brand later claimed the refusal was a mistake and supplied the artist with the bricks requested). Oh, yes – Ai’s actual art making! It’s easy to forget among the headline-grabbing political controversies. This year saw the usual round of international museum shows, notably all Western, including solo exhibitions at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; National Gallery of Prague and 21er Haus, Vienna.
12 Glenn D. Lowry Museum Director American Last Year 7 ‘Glenn Lowry is on par with the best corporate CEOs,’ says MoMA trustee Glenn Fuhrman of the museum’s director. By most measures, Lowry continues to impress: a new renovation designed by architects-du-jour Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with a price tag of roughly $50m; a Jean Nouveldesigned residential tower next door, which will add three more floors and 3,700sqm of gallery space to the museum’s footprint for another $400m. That’s a lot of cash to raise, but no worries: Lowry, with the help of his high-powered board (finance titans such as Danny Och, Leon Black and Larry Fink), secured gifts of $100m from David Geffen and $40m from Kenneth Griffin. He also sold $281m worth of tax exempt bonds at a top rate of 2.14 percent and offered voluntary buyouts to long-serving staff. The institution is now flush, and continues to serve roughly three million visitors a year. That’s museum management. Sounds to us like corporate CEOs could learn a thing or two from Lowry.
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10 Photo: Gao Yuan 11 Photo: Robin de Puy 12 Photo: Peter Ross
Artist Chinese Last Year 2
‘Ruf has a remarkably extensive, close-knit network that spans continents, disciplines and generations,’ reads part of the curator’s Stedelijk Museum biography, the Amsterdam institution she’s been directing since 2014. It’s an indication of just how much importance she places on this network: when Ruf likes an artist, she will champion them doggedly. Take her work with the relational aesthetics generation, for example, curating shows with Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. This year Rirkrit Tiravanija got a turn at the Stedelijk. Younger artists also benefit from her support. In 2015 Magali Reus won the Prix de Rome, with Ruf on the jury, and now has a solo show at the museum; Helen Marten showed at Ruf’s previous home, Kunsthalle Zürich, and is nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, with Ruf also on the jury. When she’s your fan, others (CERN, collector Maja Hoffmann, the Swiss Re reinsurance group – Ruff advises all three) tend to follow.
Profession
Power 100, 2006–2016, by profession. Figures represent raw values, with one value assigned per entry, not per individual on the list
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13 Marian Goodman
14 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
Gallerist American Last Year 12
13 Photo: Thomas Struth 14 Photo: Dagmar Schwelle. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles 15 Photo: Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan 16 Photo: Sara Pooley
The American dealer opened her New York gallery in 1977, giving Marcel Broodthaers his first (posthumous) US solo show, and over the years, she’s come to work with some of the most influential artists of several generations, among them Gerhard Richter, William Kentridge, Maurizio Cattelan, Gabriel Orozco and Pierre Huyghe. With additional spaces in Paris and London (opened in 1995 and 2014 respectively), Goodman has been steadily adding to her stable, representing younger artists including Julie Mehretu, Anri Sala, Danh Vo and Nairy Baghramian. That’s the kind of commitment and vision that saw her become the first gallerist to receive the Leo Award (ICI’s annual prize for exceptional contributors to the field of contemporary art, named after legendary art dealer Leo Castelli). What next? We hear the gallery is planning to open a second space in Paris shortly with Annette Messager’s latest works, while 2017 promises its fair share of celebrations for the gallery’s 40th anniversary.
Gallerists German Last Year 13 In February of this year, Sprüth and Magers staked their claim in Los Angeles, opening a new 4,200sqm gallery with a solo exhibition by John Baldessari. His 1971 lithograph I will not make any more boring art was emblazoned across the windows, channelling their vision for the city. For them ‘it made sense’, given their roster of local artists. From separate starts in Cologne, the pair joined forces in 1998, and have built an empire that includes spaces in Berlin and London (under renovation), offices in Cologne and Hong Kong, and the 60 artists or estates the gallery works with. The LA Times described them as ‘art world feminists who paved the way for… contemporary female artists such as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer and Rosemarie Trockel’ (who formed the core of Sprüth’s female-focused programme during the 1980s and 90s – revisited in the exhibition Eau de Cologne at Sprüth Magers LA this summer).
15 Massimiliano Gioni
16 Theaster Gates
Curator Italian Last Year 19
Artist American Last Year 30
Gioni kicked off the 12 months since the last Power 100 by curating New Skin, an exhibition of Lebanese retail magnate Tony Salamé’s private collection that inaugurated the collector’s Aïshti Foundation just outside Beirut. Occupying Gioni’s day job as New Museum artistic director were, among others, a three-floor survey of Anri Sala’s videos; an exhibition of tapestries and mise-en-scène by Goshka Macuga; and a show of Nicole Eisenman’s narrative-led paintings. Gioni and his two New York colleagues, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Helga Christoffersen, also curated The Equilibrists, a survey of young Greek art at the Benaki Museum, Athens, produced by Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation. Phew. Over in his other role, however, as artistic director of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan, it was quieter, though in April he invited Sarah Lucas to stage a three-day programme of exhibitions and performances in Albergo Diurno Venezia, a subterranean former shopping arcade in the art nouveau style.
Gates continues to balance commercial gallery glitz with progressive social practice. His archive, gallery and residency space Stony Island Arts Bank opened in Chicago last year, after managing to secure funding for refurbishments by taking marble tiles that lined the former bank’s original toilets to sell at Art Basel. This year has seen a series of large shows at institutions around the world, including transporting an entire hardware store to Fondazione Prada in Milan, recreating a vintage house-music club in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and displaying parts of his archived collection of ‘negrobilia’ at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. As Gates continues to combine the roles of potter, painter, landlord, archivist and neighbour, it has become increasingly apparent that at the heart of his projects isn’t just processes of renewal and community but also an attention to what stories are preserved, and who is able to benefit from those stories, as he seeks to keep visible the legacies of a living African-American cultural history.
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18 Bernard Blistène & Serge Lasvignes
17 Christine Macel Curator French Last Year Reentry (60 in 2006)
It’s been a busy year for the duo at the helm (director and president respectively) of the Centre Pompidou, who in addition to running an increasingly interdisciplinary programme (including retrospectives of key, although often overlooked, figures like designer Pierre Paulin and painter Karel Appel, and a show of new works by Jean-Luc Moulène) have been preparing the 40th anniversary of the museum, which kicks off this coming January. It will be a ‘decentralised celebration’, in the words of Lasvignes, who announced some 50 exhibitions and 15 dance and music performances across 40 partner institutions in France and its overseas territories. Blistène meanwhile managed to secure a donation of 350 works of Russian art from the 1950s to now, to complement the museum’s 120,000-strong collection – the largest of modern and contemporary art in Europe. Not impressed? Well, then maybe the recent announcement of a Centre Pompidou in Brussels will do the trick.
19 Marc & Arne Glimcher
20 Okwui Enwezor
Gallerists American Last Year 23
Curator American Last Year 17
They said it couldn’t be done, but Pace Gallery’s Marc Glimcher has hacked into the collecting DNA of Silicon Valley. One piece of the puzzle is Pace Art + Technology, a programme dedicated to ‘interdisciplinary art groups’ such as Random International and teamLab, as well as offerings from ‘crossover’ artists such as David Byrne. Another piece is FuturePace, an art-in-the-public-realm partnership with Futurecity that will commission big projects from teams of artists, designers, technologists and scientists. The gallery isn’t giving up on traditional mediums or artists, however. Leo Villareal joined the gallery this autumn. And Julian Schnabel, ‘wanting a more human relationship’ with his gallery (sorry, Gogo), returned to his old friend Arne. Meanwhile, plans to redevelop Pace’s flagship Chelsea space into an eight-storey commercial building come nearer to realisation. Due for completion next year, the building boasts a scale that sounds more like a museum than a gallery to us.
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Museum Directors French Last Year 15
This wasn’t the banner year for Okwui Enwezor that 2015 was, when the curator, critic, former poet and Kassel-to-Gwangju veteran became the first African-born director of the Venice Biennale. Still, a routine year for Enwezor nevertheless involved Performa’s annual gala being dedicated to him; officially this was for his catalytic role in raising the visibility of South African art, though the visibility of art from all of Africa and the diaspora would, surely, be very different without Enwezor’s evangelising over the 20 years since his first major curatorial project. Meanwhile, the typically ambitious programme he oversees at Munich’s Haus der Kunst included major monographic shows (James Casebere, Michael Buthe and an upcoming one by Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige), and the whopping global survey Postwar – Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945–65. In January he signed on for another five years at HDK: a no-brainer on its part, though Enwezor will no doubt pop up in many other places too.
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17 Photo: Jacopo Salvi. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia 18 Photo: Hervé Véronèse 19 Marc Glimcher, photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Arne Glimcher, photo: Ronald James 20 Photo: Maximilian Geuter
Any director of the Venice Biennale not included on this list in the year before their exhibition must have done something very wrong; needless to say, Christine Macel – the fourth woman to direct the show – hasn’t. Chief curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, since 2000, the bookish Macel has quietly assumed a high position in the curatoriat. Subjects of her shows include Sophie Calle, Gabriel Orozco and Nan Goldin, and she’s intimately familiar with the Giardini, having curated Eric Duyckaerts for the Belgian Pavilion in 2007 and Anri Sala’s lauded representation for the French in 2013. The larger story here appears to be that, in the wake of spotty reviews for Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 edition, which emphasised the world going to hell in a handbasket, Venice’s organisers wanted a change of pace; Macel’s show Viva arte viva, designed as a set of interconnecting pavilions, looks set to celebrate artistic expression. It is, she said, ‘a “yes” to life, although sometimes a “but” lies behind’, and promises ‘a journey, from the interiority to the infinity’. Expectations, then, are high.
21 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
22 Marc Spiegler
Collector Venezuelan Last Year 21
Art Fair Director American Last Year 25
21 Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 22 © Art Basel 23 Photo: Ben Gibbs. Courtesty the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Los Angeles 24 Photo: Ola Rindel
Phelps de Cisneros has one of the largest and most respected collections of modern and contemporary Latin American art, and yet it’s possible she doesn’t get to see much of it at any given time: through her foundation, set up during the 1970s, she has been a prodigious lender of works, pointedly eschewing the fashion among collectors for setting up private institutions. Her mission instead has been to persuade museums to expand the presence of art from the region in their own collections (and beyond: last October, Phelps de Cisneros sponsored MoMA’s Wikipedia edit-a-thon dedicated to producing entries on topics relating to Latin American art and culture). Working alongside director Gabriel PérezBarreiro is Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, who heads up the foundation’s work with contemporary art. A major player in her own right, she joined Phelps de Cisneros in 2011 and has been working actively on the foundation’s acquisitions, grant-making, residency and education programmes.
As global director of Art Basel since 2012, Spiegler could probably put his feet up and remain on a list such as this. The company’s three fairs – in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami – outflank their competitors with almost embarrassing ease. Yet there’s no resting on laurels here. The 2016 halfyear report from parent company MCH Group warned ‘the economic situation at the international level is characterised by a large number of negative factors, especially the developments in the BRIC states’. Not great news when a third of your events are in that economic grouping and another third leans heavily towards Latin American markets. Yet Spiegler and the company he helms are not ones to sail around troubled waters: to judge by the September launch of ‘Art Basel Cities’, their philosophy seems to be to face uncertainty head-on. This new consultancy strand, in which the company will be paid by municipal governments to stage noncommercial art events locally, is to launch in Buenos Aires late next year.
23 Eli & Edythe Broad
24 Pierre Huyghe
Collectors American Last Year 28
Artist French Last Year 29
The Broad Museum – or just the Broad – has reshaped the discourse on the next generation of museums. Every other private collection that is being turned into a publicly accessible art collection is taking its cue from what Eli and Edythe Broad have created – a new cultural destination (the museum was named the overall winner of the 2016 Leading Culture Destinations Awards this autumn). First-year attendance at the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building was 823,216, three times projections. What’s more, 62 percent of those visitors identified as ‘other than Caucasian’, and the average visitor was thirty-three years old, which means the Broad – and the Broads – are engaging a genuinely new audience. In 2017, the Broad will be the only California stop of the touring Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, which debuts at the Hirschhorn in Washington, DC, and travels to the Seattle Art Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Cleveland Museum of Art. That’s good company.
From being one of a number of artists engaged, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, with structuring art as a series of incomplete, ever-morphing group-authored proposals, Pierre Huyghe increasingly looks like the leading artist dealing with the nascent Anthropocene, fashioning poetic, uneasily beautiful fusions of human and animal, nature and culture via tanks of hermit crabs and biotopes, dogs and bees let loose in galleries, and increasingly unforgettable videos (eg the young girl who turns out to be a masked macaque monkey in a Tokyo restaurant in the Fukushima disaster-referencing Human Mask, 2014). This year, the winner of the 2015 Kurt Schwitters Prize picked up the 2017 Nasher Prize for Sculpture, was a mainstay of Manifesta 11 and various biennials, and had a major solo at Espace Louis Vuitton in Tokyo. Now based in Santiago, Chile, he’s currently flying somewhat under the radar; one can expect, though, that things are evolving in Huyghe’s lab.
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Notes on the List
Power in square metres Follow the money. You don’t have to be Woodward and Bernstein to figure out why galleries are increasingly opening in multiple sites (for all that they might claim: ‘We opened this for our artists!’). Where there is a collector base – or where there is a city around which collectors huddle – the dealers will go. Larry Gagosian (6) pioneered this power-through-real-estate approach (16 spaces at present count), but many of the galleries on this list have followed suit: only this year Sprüth Magers (14) and Hauser & Wirth (3) both opened spaces in Los Angeles, Emmanuel Perrotin (44) expanded to Seoul and David Zwirner (4) has announced a new Hong Kong gallery.
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Biennial might Did Riccardo Selvatico know the unholy beast he was unleashing? In 1893, the then mayor of Venice decided that a two-yearly art festival would be a boon for the city and its artists. The first biennial was duly staged in 1895. Fast-forward 121 years and it feels that one could visit a biennial, triennial or other regularly staged exhibition on any given week of the year (the World Biennial Foundation lists 196 on its website), from the iconic, such as São Paulo or Documenta (which has also come a long way since its first incarnation as an adjunct art exhibition to the German Federal Horticultural Show), to smaller and younger affairs like Whitstable Biennale or Tbilisi Triennial. If, like Adam Szymczyk (2, who has taken the reins for next year’s Documenta) or Christine Macel (17, curating the Venice Biennale in 2017), you get one of the major events, you can be sure that in the 12 months prior you’ll be everyone’s new BFF. But is it also the case, as biennials continue to proliferate, that there are only so many such events the world can take?
Private money and the public ‘Narcissistic.’ That’s what French art historian Patricia Falguières said of collectors who build their own private museums (the irony not lost that she made the accusation during a panel discussion at (no 41) Bernard Arnault’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris). Falguières’s insult stemmed from a worry – and one that has been echoed by the likes of former Tate Modern director Chris Dercon – that these institutions were opened in place of donating works to public collections. No one could accuse the likes of Eli & Edythe Broad (23, who opened the Broad in LA last year but continue to fund many of the city’s institutions) or Maja Hoffmann (26, who is opening a private institution in Arles but whose patronage is international) of being ungenerous, but the wider point stands. In contrast, collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (21) is a prodigious lender, preferring, she told the Financial Times, that ‘each work travels to a new audience’.
ArtReview
I’m more than an institution There are several museum directors on this list whose work transcends the general descriptions of their day jobs. So, for example, while the Serpentine Galleries are undoubtedly important, Hans Ulrich Obrist’s (1) position above the likes of Nicholas Serota & Frances Morris (5), Glenn D. Lowry (12) or Bernard Blistène & Serge Lasvignes (18) is not an indication that it’s more powerful than Tate, MoMA or Pompidou respectively. Instead, like Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (61, director of both the Castello di Rivoli and the GAM in Turin), Charles Esche (63, director of Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven) or Hou Hanru (71, director of MAXXI, Rome), Obrist is recognised here more for the ubiquity and influence of his activities beyond the constraints of his institution’s walls.
25 Photo: Matthew Tammaro 26 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh 27 Courtesy Gavin Brown Enterprise, New York & Rome 28 Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York
25 Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
26 Maja Hoffmann
Gallerists American Last Year 26
Collector Swiss Last Year 20
Blum and Poe can take a large part of the credit in the renewed interest in Mono-ha (the influential movement that centres on a group of Japanese artists operating from the 1960s onwards) and Dansaekhwa (which originates in Korea from approximately the same time). The gallery’s 2012 group show Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha catalysed interest in the former, with a pair of 2014 group shows introducing the latter to Western audiences. Since then, the pair, through their galleries in LA, New York and Tokyo, have explored both with gusto, including 2016 exhibitions for Susumu Koshimizu (associated with Mono-ha) and Kwon Young-woo (Dansaekhwa), as well as the monochromatic group show Black. But don’t consider the gallery po-faced (sorry); alongside this art-historical work, there’s space for a collaboration between Richard Prince and High Times magazine, and a show by Kanye West, in which the musician presented Famous, a silicone sculpture of 12 well-known celebrities naked in bed.
‘We are creating a place where artists, thinkers, scientists – as well as doers and actors of the economic world – can gather and work together on new scripts for the world,’ Maja Hoffmann told The Art Newspaper of her plans for Luma Arles, a Frank Gehry-designed, €100m palace of culture that is rising in a former train yard in the French city. Hoffmann’s network for recruiting these ‘doers’ is extensive (Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf are the foundation’s ‘core’ advisory group, names worth noting as Hoffmann gets ready to appoint a director for this new institution); her existing Zürich space is active (this summer it hosted part of Manifesta 11); her patronage is international (Kunsthalle Basel, Palais de Tokyo and the Serpentine Galleries are among the many beneficiaries of her largesse). Oh, and in June she was appointed chair of the Swiss Institute, adding to key roles at Tate, Kunsthalle Zürich Foundation, the New Museum and CCS Bard.
27 Gavin Brown
28 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty
Gallerist British Last Year 24 There’s not many dealers who can get away with holding their Art Basel dinner at the local McDonald’s, but that kind of hipster irony fits the New York-based gallerist to a T. Brown’s been hoovering up cool for two decades now: this year he was the first of several city galleries to announce plans to open in Harlem (complementing his Lower East Side gallery), the space inaugurated with a solo show by Ed Atkins. He also steers the fledgling careers of the likes of Rachel Rose, Avery Singer and Ella Kruglyanskaya, while representing critical big beasts such as Jannis Kounellis (who showed in Brown’s year-old Rome gallery, a deconsecrated ninth-century church), Thomas Bayrle, Joan Jonas and Sturtevant (who all also had solo shows in one of the three spaces in 2016). In addition to all that, Brown maintains time and energy for offbeat projects: Rirkrit Tiravanija’s ongoing summertime restaurant/art project Unclebrother in Delaware County, New York, for example. No Big Macs there, we’re thinking.
Gallerists British Last Year 34 Ahead of its 50th anniversary in 2017, Lisson, for so long associated with a corner of northwest London, went truly global in May 2016, inaugurating its new gallery in New York (its first in the US, and third internationally, joining the ones in London and Milan). It opened with 101-year-old Cuban artist Carmen Herrera, highlighting how artists, as well as galleries, can continue to be successful past fifty. Elsewhere Lisson artists maintain their presence across the globe – Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg at M21 in Shanghai, Broomberg & Chanarin at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Haroon Mirza at Pivô in São Paulo, Christian Jankowski’s curating of Manifesta 11, in Zürich – mixed reviews notwithstanding – and Rashid Rana’s appointment as artistic director of the inaugural Lahore Biennale in Pakistan in 2017 – to name but a few.
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29 Thelma Golden
30 Jeff Koons
Curator American Last Year 47
Artist American Last Year 14 Coinciding with his 60th birthday, Koons’s major touring retrospective in 2014–15 marked a milestone in the multimillionaire artist’s career, but it hasn’t meant he’s been in any less demand since. In 2016 Damien Hirst honoured him with a five-month showcase of works from his own collection at his Newport Street Gallery in London. It was also Koons whom Almine Rech chose to inaugurate her new London gallery in Mayfair this October, with works from his series of Gazing Ball paintings. For those with smaller budgets, Koons also collaborated with Google to create a series of $40 phone cases. Allegations that Koons laid off 14 staff from his New York studio for attempting to unionise circulated in the summer, without conclusion, and in December 2015 a lawsuit (not the first) was filed against him for copyright infringement on a photograph appropriated without permission. Whatever the outcome, no doubt Koons will come out smiling.
31 Sadie Coles
32 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto
Gallerist British Last Year 36
Gallerists Mexican / Colombian Last Year 44
In 2015, one of London-based Sadie Coles’s key artists, Sarah Lucas, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. In 2016, more recent signing Helen Marten is in the running for two UK awards: the Turner Prize and the inaugural Hepworth Sculpture Prize. Marten’s Turner Prize show also runs concurrently with a solo show at London’s Serpentine Galleries, and she is competing for the Hepworth with another of Coles’s artists, Steven Claydon. All of which is evidence that, after 20 years in the business, Coles’s instinct for working with and nurturing artists with high-profile potential remains undiminished. Other major names at the gallery include Urs Fischer, Ugo Rondinone, Elizabeth Peyton, Gregor Schneider and Matthew Barney. There have been no new gallery venues added in the last 12 months to the three London spaces Coles currently runs, but with a track record of frequent gallery moves and upgrades (last year she opened a big new gallery on Davies Street), it’s always a question of watching this space.
While inarguably a big beast in the artworld (working with stars such as Gabriel Orozco, Adrián Villar Rojas, Danh Vo and Rirkrit Tiravanija), Kurimanzutto likes to present a relaxed family vibe at its Mexico City operation (encouraged not least by the fact that Kuri and Manzutto are married, and also represent José’s brother, Gabriel Kuri). Recently the gallery hung a show by photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, for example, not in their vast exhibition space, a former lumberyard, but down the street in the pair’s favourite cantina, the artist’s prints attached to the café’s mirrored walls, and visitors as likely to be there for the meat and black beans as for the work. From here to there: ‘there’ being San Francisco, and this being the title of the latest Kurimanzutto exhibition at galleries other than their own (previous shows were at Chantal Crousel and Patrick Seguin in Paris, Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles), which the duo brought to Jessica Silverman Gallery in January.
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29 Photo: Julie Skarratt 30 © Jeff Koons. Photo: Chris Fanning 31 Photo: Juergen Teller 32 Photo: Diego Pérez. Courtesy Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
The director and chief curator of New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem has over the past ten years not only managed to turn the museum into a destination institution, staging high-profile exhibitions that explore where race, gender and aesthetics meet; she has managed to position these exhibitions as a spark for US-wide public debate. In addition to sitting on the board of the Obama Foundation, helping to oversee preservation of the White House and the creation of the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago, this year she won the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from CCS Bard and joined the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She made a brief public appearance in London, in discussion with her husband, designer Duro Olowu, who curated an exhibition based around textiles and pattern at Camden Arts Centre earlier this year; perhaps we’ll see more of her internationally in the near future.
33 Jay Jopling
34 Michael Govan
Gallerist British Last Year 35
Museum Director American Last Year 31
33 Photo: Hugo Rittson. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong 34 Photo: Catherine Opie 35 Photo: Matteo De Fina 36 Photo: Anette Aurell
To many, Jopling and his gallery White Cube will always be intimately linked to the Young British Artist phenomenon. While White Cube always operated on a much broader terrain than that, the past 12 months have seen the gallery’s cosmopolitanism come to the fore. White Cube’s relationship with YBA-ers Marc Quinn and Marcus Harvey ended (the Chapman brothers, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst remain) and an exhibition programme across White Cube’s two vast London spaces strike a decidedly eclectic tone, with shows by the likes of Jac Leirner (her second at the gallery), Park Seo-Bo (his first in the UK) and Dóra Maurer (which, like the Park exhibition, was curated by independent adviser Katharine Kostyál). And while some of White Cube’s Brits – Emin and Darren Almond – had shows at White Cube’s Hong Kong space, what’s now White Cube’s signature eclecticism kicked in with a summer show of work by Danh Vo.
As Los Angeles gains power in the artworld – note the number of big thumper-gallery outfits opening spaces in the city – Govan does, too. The director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art since 2006 noted in an interview towards the end of last year that while, museumwise, LA is still behind New York, ‘for a young artist it seems to be the city of choice right now’. This can only bode well for the future. Money is still an issue at LACMA, however, even with a $115 million endowment, especially in the lead-up to opening a $600 million new home (not an extension – the new building will reduce the museum’s footprint by 2,300sqm – but an upgrade). Fundraising, Govan says, is ‘neverending’, but the results are shows like this year’s Agnes Martin survey and the current one-audience-member-at-a-time film installation by Loris Gréaud.
35 François Pinault
36 Rirkrit Tiravanija
Collector French Last Year 33
Artist Thai Last Year 42
After years of rumour and speculating on Pinault’s intentions to open a space in the French capital to show his collection – and exactly two years after his rival Bernard Arnault inaugurated the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris – the French megacollector and businessman finally took the leap, announcing a 50-year lease on La Bourse du Commerce from the city council. Pinault, who also owns Christie’s, is anticipating spending €50m to finance Tadao Ando’s makeover of the landmark eighteenthcentury building – the Japanese architect is also responsible for designing his foundation’s two venues in Venice, Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi – and its operating costs. This year the collector also launched an artist residency in Lens, France, and the Pierre Daix Prize – named in memory of the writer and art historian who passed away last year – which offers a €10,000 stipend to facilitate the publication of a book on modern or contemporary art.
Sociable collaboration between artists, and artists and their publics, is virtually the rule now. But it’s been Rirkrit Tiravanija’s wheelhouse (most famously involving serving meals to visitors as art) for close to a quarter-century, and the Thai catalyst’s example only looks more important as time goes on. Clarifying his generational impact, when Tiravanija recently collaborated with 40 people on a nearly 27m-long print chronicling his nomadic life, he exhibited it alongside work by rising star Korakrit Arunanondchai, his own former student. In the latest iteration of his Tomorrow is the Question, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Tiravanija invited viewers to play ping-pong. In LA, meanwhile, collaborating with design studio wHY, he set up a timberframed house as a focus for interactions with the proximate Los Angeles River, a project highlighting the crucial importance of water and a reminder that bringing people together always has political potential.
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38 Dakis Joannou
Artists Russian / Mexican / American Last Year 39
Not content with Deste’s art space in Athens, and the project space on the island of Hydra, Joannou’s foundation has been increasingly taking up residence in various museums. Works from the collection are now an almost constant presence in the Benaki Museum, Athens, for instance, where this year Joannou cocurated a survey of work by the late Greek sculptor George Lappas. In June, while artist Roberto Cuoghi and his team were kiln-firing dozens of ceramic crabs as part of the artist’s Deste commission on Hydra, The Equilibrists opened at the Benaki, featuring a survey of young Greek art selected from open submission and through a hundred studio visits by New Museum curators Gary Carrion-Murayari, Helga Christoffersen and Massimiliano Gioni. The last of these was on hand again to curate Urs Fischer – False Friends at the Museum of Art and History of Geneva, in which sculpture by the Swiss artist was buddied up with works by the likes of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and Robert Gober – all owned by Joannou.
Collector Greek Last Year 43
Seventeen years after they set up e-flux as an online mailer for exhibition announcements, the founders of the irrepressible, unpredictable curatorial/publishing/fill-in-the-blank platform are keeping the pot boiling in several senses. The exhibition updates, of course, continue; e-flux Journal, now eight years old, remains a monthly go-to read for art theory heads (recent issues have seen sharp-edged essays by, among others, Donna Haraway, Douglas Coupland, Claire Fontaine and, of course, Hito Steyerl). This year saw the arrival of e-flux Architecture (in collaboration with Nikolaus Hirsch), expanding the breadth of e-flux’s reach and opening new avenues in its attempts to engage with the social. Perhaps in connection with that, in March e-flux announced plans to rectify the lack of good artist bars in New York by opening a café/bar in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill. With wi-fi, no doubt.
39 Daniel Buchholz
40 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi
Gallerist German Last Year 40
Curator Emirati Last Year 48
It is perhaps fitting that Daniel Buchholz is the son of an antique book dealer – ‘buch’ means ‘book’ in German. Launching his Upper East Side New York gallery in 2015 with an exhibition about French poet Raymond Roussel, he told Artnet how he was hoping for ‘a very different form of engagement with the subject. The real experts are here.’ With a gallery in Berlin and two in Cologne, where he also looks after his father’s bookshop, his empire has transferred the power of words into art, representing some of today’s hottest artists. These include Lukas Duwenhögger, whose 2016 exhibition in New York’s Artists Space was described by the International New York Times as ‘a full, mesmerizing view of a German artist’, as well as Anne Imhof, who has dominated 2016 with her threeact ‘exhibition-as-opera’ Angst (starting at the Kunsthalle Basel, moving on to Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof and presenting its final act at La Biennale de Montréal).
Few discussions of Arab art and its global visibility can exclude mention of this Power 100 perennial, who has been instrumental in the cultural rejuvenation and soft-power reach of the UAE (Sharjah is ruled by her father). While the Sharjah Biennial (which the sheikha has run since 2003) rests this year, the Sharjah Art Foundation continues with an ambitious programme that pushes conceptual, if not political, boundaries in the conservative Muslim state. Notable exhibitions include the experimental The Time is Out of Joint, which contained reenactments of the first Arab Art Biennial in Baghdad (1974) and the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing, as well as an imagining of a future event, the Equator Conference 2022 in Yogyakarta. This sheikha (who also sits on the board of MoMA PS1) has personality. This year’s homecoming show of UAE’s national pavilion in the 56th Venice Biennale, which she curated, had a quirky venue: a ‘Flying Saucer’ building built in the 1970s that used to be a pizzeria.
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37 Photo: Ray Anastas 38 Photo: Catherine Panchout 39 Photo: Spencer Hinson 40 Photo: Nato Welton. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation
37 Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood
Nationality
Power 100, 2006–2016, by nationality. Figures represent raw values, with one value assigned per individual, not per entry on the list
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41 Bernard Arnault
42 Gerhard Richter
Collector French Last Year 38
Artist German Last Year 27
41 Photo: Todd Eberle 42 Photo: Hubert Becker 43 Photo: Rusten Hogness 44 Photo: Karl Lagerfeld
The French billionaire and CEO of the LVMH group has received much attention this year. Not just because he’s the richest man in France or because Kanye West named him as an inspiration (‘One of my absolute favourites’). But also – less glamorously – because he was accused of censorship by the union of the daily Le Parisien (which he acquired last year), after it noted that one of this year’s French blockbuster documentaries Merci Patron! – an acidic critique of Arnault and the LVMH group – didn’t get a mention anywhere in the paper. Luckily, Daniel Buren’s makeover of the Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris shifted the focus from his role as patron to his role as patron. This October the foundation is showing the Shchukin Collection, presented for the first time in nearly 100 years outside of Russia, while the foundation’s spaces in Munich, Venice, Beijing and Tokyo have shown works from its own collection by artists such as Tacita Dean and Pierre Huyghe.
As any Richter historian will tell you: trying to pinpoint a sense of style to the artist’s work is a task doomed to failure. For the past six decades Richter has famously moved relentlessly between abstraction and figuration, from gloomy monochrome to bright experimentation in colour. The uniting factor, Richter’s subject, if you like, being painting itself. Given his refusal to a ‘signature’ aesthetic, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the painter has no truck with the ‘cult of personality’ he believes to now surround contemporary artists. ‘It’s a frightening development,’ he bemoaned to Die Zeit this year. Other than the usual dizzying sales – Liu Yiqian posted a picture on WeChat of the 11m-long stripe painting he bought from Marian Goodman, Eric Clapton is selling a Richter valued at $20m – it’s been a relatively quiet year for Richter: just the one museum show and a trio of gallery exhibitions (including at Goodman’s New York space in May). But his influence on painting globally remains big.
43 Donna Haraway
44 Emmanuel Perrotin
Philosopher American Last Year New
Gallerist French Last Year 52
A member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of Documenta 13, this feminist theorist, philosopher of science and distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been around a long time: her ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ was written in 1983 ostensibly to address feminism in the Reagan era, but in its speculation on a complete collapse of boundaries between human, nonhuman, animal and machine, proved canonical. Open any art magazine over the past 12 months, read any curatorial statement, pick up a press release, and it won’t be long before you find a Haraway reference. This year, interest in the dissolution of binaries – be it gender, sexuality – has been particularly acute in art. Nor does Haraway connect just with identity politics: her more recent work on the Anthropocene, brought into focus with the publication this year of Staying with the Trouble, has proved beguilingly urgent for artists and curators alike.
From its roots in Paris, Galerie Perrotin has steadily expanded east and west. A Hong Kong gallery opened in 2012 – reflecting Perrotin’s longstanding interest in art from East Asia (he was the first gallerist to show Takashi Murakami outside of Japan) – and April of this year saw the inauguration of a new space in Seoul, with a Laurent Grasso exhibition, a few months after leading Dansaekhwa painter Park Seo-Bo had filled the Paris space. Meanwhile, heading west, a solo show in the gallery’s New York space, of over fifty years of paintings by the Icelandic artist Erró, marked one of the final exhibitions before the gallery’s move to the Lower East Side and a larger 7,600sqm space. As much as all this east and west traffic helps to make the products of local cultures globally popular, Perrotin has never been afraid of art’s embrace of popular culture itself: this year he showed fashion photographer Terry Richardson in Hong Kong.
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46 Marina Abramović
Collector Italian Last Year 61
Artist Serbian Last Year 8
Since opening its complex of ten buildings in Milan last May, Fondazione Prada, the multi-artform creative initiative of the fashion-house designer and collector, has hosted a busy programme, including exhibitions by Theaster Gates and Nástio Mosquito, a choreographic project by Billy Cowie and a group show curated by Thomas Demand. A current major exhibition of works by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz contains Five Car Stud (1969–72); the horrific lifesize tableaux, depicting a black man being castrated by masked white assailants, was bought by Prada in 2012. And that doesn’t take into account projects at Prada’s Venice location, which include video by Michelangelo and Enrica Antonioni. Following on from the Fondazione’s screening of 15 films chosen by Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu, Prada has announced that it will again be partnering with Iñárritu, along with Legendary Entertainment, to create a short experimental virtual-reality film.
In November 2016, performance and endurance art doyenne Marina Abramović will turn seventy. A fellow 2016 septuagenarian, Tate director Nicholas Serota, chose this milestone year to step down from his position, but Abramović seems more rather than less committed to her work. This has however increasingly meant disseminating the Abramović Method – a set of exercises honed by the artist over her career to ‘explore boundaries of body and mind’ – in collaboration with others rather than continuing personally to undertake the testing physical performances that earned her her reputation. The artist had a less successful outcome in the court case with former creative and life partner Ulay, to whom she has been ordered by a Dutch court to pay €250,000, for violating a joint rights contract for work they made together. Abramović also faced flack over inflammatory comments about indigenous Australians (since removed) circulated in a proof of her forthcoming memoirs.
47 Isa Genzken
48 Sheena Wagstaff
Artist German Last Year 37
Curator British Last Year New
When Isa Genzken tells us to Make Yourself Pretty!, ArtReview reaches obediently for the powder compact, no questions asked. This emphatically titled exhibition – near double the size of the artist’s 2013 MoMA retrospective – came courtesy of Beatrix Ruf last December, a year after taking the helm of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Long a champion of Genzken’s, this was the show in which the curator nailed her colours to the mast of that venerable institution. This April the show travelled to Berlin amid much homecoming fanfare. New York’s not forgotten Genzken quite yet, though: over the summer the artist’s nine-metre-high Two Orchids blossomed in Central Park. As for her influence on the coming generation? A quick spin around this year’s Turner Prize nominees turns up enigmatic assemblages, animistic concrete forms, urban detritus, weird clothing, New York pop culture – Genzken everywhere, in other words, peeping around the edges.
The opening of the Met’s new Breuer branch in March – spearheaded by Wagstaff, the Met’s chairman of the department of modern and contemporary art since 2012 – has, as a Financial Times writer put it, given ‘a slow-moving institution an entrée into the world of investor/collectors, young artists, unconsummated trends, blowout biennials and feverish prices’. Yet Wagstaff maintains the move is no big deal, telling the FT, ‘We’re going back to our original mission.’ Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, wasn’t so sure. The critic praised the opening exhibition of Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, and the modern works in the group show Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, but noted that the contemporary-art ‘learning curve seems steeper than expected’. With six years at the Breuer, however, before completion of a permanent home for the department in the Met’s Fifth Avenue extension, the institution, under the guidance of Wagstaff, a former chief curator at Tate, will undoubtedly find its stride.
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45 Photo: Manuela Pavesi 46 Photo: Nils Müller and Wertical 47 Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York 48 Photo: Samantha Nandez / BFA
45 Miuccia Prada
Notes on the List
Price plummet There’s no doubt that some elements of the contemporary art market are suffering right now. A recent analysis by The Telegraph found that in October 2015 the London auction houses raised £185m from 884 contemporary lots. This year just 746 lots were offered, carrying a total minimum estimate of £131.5m. So the stats suggest sellers are nervous. Devaluation is mostly a problem for collectors who got caught up in the speculative buying of young art (an abstract canvas by Hugh Scott-Douglas bought in 2014 for £100,000 had to be sold for just £20,000 in September; works by Lucien Smith were also changing hands for six figures in 2013, but you can get one of his paintings for around £7k now). Not that longevity and art-historical importance can fully protect you: (no 42 ) Gerhard Richter’s auction sales (though not his prices) are down 92 percent from their peak in 2012, according to Artprice.
Thinking your way to the top The placement of thinkers and philosophers on the Power 100 presents one of the committee’s biggest challenges. To trace the life of a thought from germination to the moment it becomes so pervasive that one can say it has ‘power’ is tricky enough, but then determining whether the person who originally believed it can now claim sole ownership is even harder. This year only one philosopher, Donna Haraway (43), was believed to be influencing the production of art and exhibition-making enough for inclusion, though in the past Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier & Iain Hamilton Grant, the group of theorists loosely associated with speculative realism, have been present.
Sell less, think more Hito Steyerl (7), Ai Weiwei (10) and Wolfgang Tillmans (9) do not appear in any market analysis listing the top ten most expensive living artists, yet they rank higher on the Power 100 than Jeff Koons (30), Gerhard Richter (42) or Christopher Wool (80), who often do. If this list was about money, our job would easy, but as it is, we’re trying to measure something that isn’t really quantifiable (even though a number is assigned at the end!): the power of influence. The work of Steyerl, Ai, and Tillmans is exhibited widely, but more than that, their ideas – be it Steyerl’s thinking on media in the tech age, Ai’s activism or Tillmans’s message of liberal internationalism – have become global artistic themes, almost detaching themselves from the art objects themselves (which after all can only be in so many places at once).
November 2016
Glocal The neologism ‘glocal’ gained currency during the mid-1990s, around the same time Rick Lowe (89) was starting his Project Row Houses initiative. Lowe’s methodology – of sewing art and urban regeneration together so that they become indistinguishable – has been taken on by others, not least Theaster Gates (16) in Chicago and Assemble in the UK. The idea of working in a very local way, but with international effect, is not lost on Adam Szymczyk (2) either, it would seem: by basing half of next year’s Documenta exhibition in Athens, he’s as much acting the ‘south as a state of mind’ as exhibiting it.
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Gender
Power 100, 2006–16, by gender. Graph represents the percentage value, with raw values shown alongside. Value is assigned per individual, not per entry on the list
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49 Christine Tohmé
50 Ed Atkins
Curator Lebanese Last Year 74
Artist British Last Year New
49 Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation 50 Photo: Andrea Guermani 51 Photo: Casey Kelbaugh 52 Courtesy Domus Collection
Often in the year preceding a biennial its curator will embark on a crazy travel schedule, fitting in as many studio visits as possible. When, as Tohmé has decided for her steerage of the 13th Sharjah Biennial, the biennial breaks the singular exhibition format and unfolds instead over a full year (starting October), encompassing shows and public programmes in Sharjah and Beirut, together with projects spread across Dakar, Ramallah and Istanbul, travel becomes even more of a necessity. So it must have been galling at least, not to say a political outrage, that Tohmé had her passport revoked and a warrant issued against her by the Lebanese government in January. Though the travel ban proved temporary, the curator – and founder and director of the Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan – was in no doubt that it formed part of a general crackdown on those involved in the arts following antigovernment protests in Lebanon in 2015.
Hans Ulrich Obrist described Atkins as ‘one of the great artists of our time’. While the curator can occasionally be prone to hyperbole, there are plenty who agree with his assessment. It is Atkins’s use of liquidlike animation and facial recognition software that often grabs the attention initially, but what really makes Atkins deserving of HUO’s accolade – and deserving of the solo shows this year at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin; The Kitchen, New York; SMK, Copenhagen; and Gavin Brown’s new Harlem gallery – is the artist’s ability to tap into the anxiety of the digital age. The avatars that appear in Atkins’s films (he also makes sculptures) often have romantic angst to them as they offer soliloquies (written and voiced by the artist himself) on depression and love. Indeed, such is the literary nature of Atkins’s work that a collection of his writings was released this year.
51 Klaus Biesenbach
52 Richard Chang
Museum Director German Last Year 62
Collector American Last Year 63
“I think of Klaus as a curator but so much more. But that word, cure, and the word curator is the best way that I could define what art has done for me,” gushed Lady Gaga after Biesenbach presented her with an artist award last October. Since then, Biesenbach has purchased a small geodesic dome, eaten vanilla ice cream at the Four Seasons with Agnes Gund and attended Proenza Schouler’s Fall 2016 show. So, business as usual for New York’s poker-faced celebrity curator? Well, not exactly. Twelve months ago Biesenbach announced a year of free admission to PS1 for New Yorkers. In December Jerry Saltz penned a hat-eating essay on how he ‘Learned to Love the MoMA Again’, citing the Biesenbach-curated Wael Shawky exhibition at PS1 as ‘one of the best shows of the year’. And in April, in an acknowledgement of the role Biesenbach played in making Berlin a throbbing contemporary art hub – as founding director of KW and the city’s biennial – Germany awarded him the Cross of the Order of Merit.
Do all boards on important museums lead to Richard Chang? Maybe. In London this collector is a longtime trustee of the Royal Academy of Art, the vice-chair of the Tate International Council and a member of its Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee. In the US he is a trustee of MoMA PS1 and the chair of performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This year he adds another feather to his cap: president of Performa, the influential New York biennial dedicated to performance in contemporary art. Besides having a say in major institutions, he makes it a point to offer individual artists support through the Domus Collection, which he founded back in 2008. This year he has supported Tatsuo Miyajima’s solo show at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Mariko Mori’s eco-installation for the Rio Olympics, Ring: One with Nature, a luminous 6m-high ring at the peak of a waterfall.
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53 Barbara Gladstone
54 Adrian Cheng
Gallerist American Last Year 46
Collector Chinese Last Year 76 Coming from a high-profile business family that owns the hospitality and mall group New World Development Company and the chain of Chow Tai Fook jewellery stores ubiquitous across Hong Kong, this young billionaire is also one of the kingpins in the territory’s art scene. In 2008 he set up the K11 art mall, and two years later, K11 Art Foundation (KAF), now a major catalyst for art projects linking Greater China to the rest of the world. KAF has played ambassador and cheerleader with remarkable success. Since its inception, hundreds of events have been organised across its Hong Kong, Shanghai and Wuhan branches, and partnerships forged with international institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo and Centre Pompidou in Paris. The hunger for conversations and connections has not stopped. This year, KAF set up a New York residency for emerging Chinese artists at the New Museum, with the first recipient being Hangzhoubased film and video artist Cheng Ran.
55 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang
56 Esther Schipper
Gallerists Chinese Last Year 56
Gallerist German Last Year 79
Zhang Wei and Hu Fang’s 14-year-old Vitamin Creative Space has retained its status as one of China’s most influential art venues: a thinking woman/ man’s gallery with progressive programming and publications. Besides boasting a roster of top art intelligentsia from the mainland, including media artist Cao Fei, who opened a solo exhibition at New York’s MoMA PS1 this year, it presented Danish-Vietnamese A-lister Danh Vo’s 2.2.1861 (2009–) at its villagelike outpost in Guangzhou, Mirrored Gardens. Designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and opened last year, Mirrored Gardens comprises a gallery, art studios and overnight accommodation. Hu, a critic, writer, curator and e-flux and ArtReview Asia contributor, also lent some conceptual heft to the project by publishing a book, Sou Fujimoto: Towards a Non-Intentional Space, Vol. 1, with essays that reflect on the complex’s design, with bonus musings on Zen gardens, landscape aesthetics and a neo-agricultural lifestyle.
It’s a truism that Schipper has come a long way since ‘gallery sitting’ for Monika Sprüth – as phrased in her Randian interview. She opened her own gallery in Cologne during the 1980s, later moving it to Berlin, where it has streadily grown in size and power. Last year she announced her merger-cum-acquisition of fellow Berlin stalwart Johnen Galerie, telling Artinfo, ‘We are taking an innovative route to enhance our already excellent standing in the global art market.’ The two are now poised to open an exhibition space near the fashionable, gallery-centric area of Potsdamer Strasse. Her five-year takeover of the business sees her own programme, which includes greats such as Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe (who recently dug up the Met’s roof garden), absorbing powerhouse artists such as Tino Sehgal (whose Palais de Tokyo exhibition opens this autumn), Turner Prize-winner Martin Boyce, Minimalism legend Dan Graham and Ryan Gander, whose works she exhibited this summer.
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53 Photo: Lena C. Emery. Courtesy ArtReview, London 54 Courtesy K11 Foundation 55 Photo: Zhang Wei 56 Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin
At the tail end of last year, and extending her square meterage beyond the two Chelsea galleries and the space in Brussels, Gladstone inaugurated ‘Gladstone 64’, a smaller townhouse-style space, with an exhibition of graphite drawings and polychromatic works by Pierre Klossowski. Shows by Marisa Merz, Philippe Parreno, Alighiero Boetti and Carroll Dunham followed. In the spring Gladstone showed work by Anish Kapoor across the Chelsea spaces. One was dominated by a gallery-filling prehistoric-looking archway, complemented a few blocks down by a series of the artist’s red wax paintings. The ancient past was obviously in the air: Ugo Rondinone titled his April exhibition of 47 cast-bronze fish in Brussels primordial. Which made Gladstone’s September trip down memory lane – when Matthew Barney recreated his first exhibition with the gallery, from 1991 – seem positively of-the-moment.
57 Photo: Ruy Teixeira 58 Photo: Ezra Petronio 59 Paweł Althamer, dla tima i burkharda, 2004. © the artist. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy Neugerriemschneider, Berlin 60 Photo: Scott Rudd. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London
57 Luisa Strina
58 Matthew Marks
Gallerist Brazilian Last Year 55
Gallerist American Last Year 65
With no end to Brazil’s economic woes in sight, the domestic art market is taking a hit. But Strina, who has navigated this sort of stuff for 40 years, can be assured that her reputation and international client base, built working with the likes of Alexandre da Cunha, Cildo Meireles, Olafur Eliasson, Fernanda Gomes and the estates of Robert Rauschenberg and Lygia Pape, will see her through the rough times. Even so, the gallerist is taking no chances: the gallery’s return to the Armory Show in New York, after more than ten years of absence, is noteworthy. At home it’s business as usual at the Jardins gallery space: an exhibition for Jorge Macchi (following his extensive retrospective at Museo de Arte Latinoámericano de Buenos Aires) and a show for Mateo López that stretched beyond the current gallery into Strina’s original space, a short walk away. This smaller, multilevel site, which the gallery had been using as storage, is now intermittently to serve as a project room.
There are many reasons why Matthew Marks is a perennial figure on this list, but all of them come back to the artists the New York and LA gallerist works with. King among these is Jasper Johns (who exhibited over 30 years of monotypes in one of three NY spaces this year). The American star has this to say about his gallerist: ‘Artists… like to think that they are the center of attention. I think Matthew is capable of making artists feel that.’ His other artists are no less iconic; considered as a group, they feel like a who’s who of American art and beyond. Between Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Ron Nagle, Charles Ray, Brice Marden (who had a show of new paintings in LA earlier in the year) and the late Ellsworth Kelly, one could write the history of the country. Couple them with Thomas Demand, Fischli/Weiss, Katharina Fritsch and Luigi Ghirri (who also got a show in New York) and Marks’s skill at making each of them feel the most important person in the room is doubly impressive.
59 Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider
60 Luc Tuymans
Gallerists German Last Year 78
Luc Tuymans is increasingly happy to fire shots at the artworld. Last year he bemoaned that ‘having a network’ was being confused with being a good curator (something which will be tested by his curating of a James Ensor show at the Royal Academy, London, this month). This year he told the Brooklyn Rail that ‘a good painting is a bad painting in a photograph’, a broadside perhaps to the kind of abstraction that is being traded over Instagram. He played on the relationship between the canvas and the lens further with a series of works debuted at Zeno X in September, a show marking 25 years of working with the Antwerp gallery. Insert I, II, III and IV are paintings of iPhone photographs of his own works that Tuymans shot during a 2013 solo show at the Menil Collection, Houston. Lenses of a different kind were a subject of his exhibitions at the Museum aan de Stroom (a homecoming gig) and currently at the National Portrait Gallery, London, featuring as their motif only his works that include spectacles.
Artist Belgian Last Year 67
Tim Neuger and Burkhard Riemschneider have been mainstays in the Berlin art scene since they opened their first Charlottenberg-based gallery in 1994. With Neuger sitting on Art Basel’s powerful selection committee, and with the gallery now nestled in Mitte directly behind the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, their programme boasts some of the most talked about artists of today. Institutions are chomping at the bit to present their works: Mario García Torres and Sharon Lockhart were included in this year’s Manifesta, while Olafur Eliasson’s summer exhibition at the Château de Versailles demonstrated his continuing ability to seduce the crowds, with a giant waterfall seemingly cascading from the sky. And let’s not forget recent Berlin resident Ai Weiwei, whose exhibition at London’s Royal Academy last winter attracted over 372,000 visitors.
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61 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
62 William Kentridge
Museum Director American Last Year 10
Artist South African Last Year 81
61 Photo: Giorgio Perottino 62 Photo: Marc Shoul 63 Photo: Judith Warringa 64 Urs Fischer, Runaway Tulip, 2016. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan, London & Hong Kong
For most people, directing one major art institution is a fulltime job. But when you have the energy and drive of Christov-Bakargiev, you don’t settle for anything less than being the director of two. At the beginning of this year she took up her roles as director of both Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM) and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, both in Turin. Making connections is her lifeblood. To quote Adrián Villar Rojas, one of the younger artists Christov-Bakargiev has championed, not least in her 2015 Istanbul Biennial, ‘She’s a neverending hyper-connectivity machine. She can connect and create relations with anything.’ Since taking up her current posts, she’s pushed various Arte Povera artists, at both institutions, while revisiting her ongoing enquiries into the possible intellectual connections between art nouveau and the Anthropocene in the group show Organisms (at GAM) and hosting an Ed Atkins solo show (Castello di Rivoli).
The South African artist’s intelligent multidisciplinary works – drawing, animation, books, tapestry, music, theatre, dance, opera and a healthy dose of silent-movie slapstick exploring philosophy, art history, science and politics – continue to be in international demand. In April Kentridge unveiled a 550m-long frieze along the banks of the Tiber in Rome. Following on from shows in China and Korea in 2015, his numerous exhibitions in 2016 include: No It Is!, at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Entirely Not So, an exhibition of largescale lithographs, etchings, linocuts and serigraphs at Kewenig Galerie, Berlin, accompanied by a display of prints from the artist’s own collection; Thick Time – three largescale installations at the Whitechapel Gallery – and Paper Music – a series of live film and music performances at Print Room, both in London. Also in the UK capital this month, the artist’s touring production of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu will be performed at the English National Opera.
63 Charles Esche
64 Massimo De Carlo
Museum Director British Last Year 92
Gallerist Italian Last Year 72
One thing’s for certain: Charles Esche gets around. As the director of Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum since 2004 and cofounder of Afterall Journal, he has simultaneously found time to curate numerous biennials. His most recent undertaking was the 2015–16 Jakarta Biennale, Neither Forward nor Back. Esche described how the exhibition’s focus was ‘on the here and now and the responses of artists to the social, political and economic conditions in which they find themselves’. Typical of Esche’s interest in socially relevant practices, his broader research involves ‘rethinking centres and museums of contemporary art as public spaces that show us the power and value of art in engaging with society’, having previously been director at Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden, and Tramway, Glasgow.
De Carlo celebrated 30 years in the gallery biz this March by gifting himself a new outpost in Hong Kong to join those in London and Milan. HK is not wholly unexplored territory for De Carlo: he has served on the selection committee for Art Basel Hong Kong, and has shown at the fair since 2013, and he’s already experienced ‘excellent feedback from the Far East market’. In May, the Milan gallerist’s status in the upper echelons was cemented by his participation in a Felix Gonzalez-Torres three-way, alongside consecutive shows at Andrea Rosen (New York) and Hauser & Wirth (London). Despite having once been taped to the wall by him, De Carlo has also long been a champion of artist-showman Maurizio Cattelan, who made a spectacular return from retirement this September with the ‘participatory artwork’ America (a functional gold toilet) installed at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. If it’s good for Cattelan, it’s good for De Carlo. Here’s to the next 30 years.
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66 Matthew Slotover, Amanda Sharp & Victoria Siddall
65 Walid Raad Artist Lebanese Last Year Reentry (77 in 2012)
In April 2016 Frieze announced that it was going into partnership with sport and entertainment conglomerate WME-IMG, which represents Hollywood stars and athletes from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to Novak Djokovic. It’s been two years since Frieze cofounders Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp announced that they were handing over the running of the three Frieze art fairs (two in London and one in New York) to Victoria Siddall. Since then they’ve launched Frieze Academy – a yearround programme of talks and courses – and made a very lowkey announcement in the autumn issue of the Berlin-based Frieze d/e magazine that that issue would be its last. Slotover and Sharp still retain overall control of the fairs, remaining magazines (Frieze, Frieze Masters and Frieze Week) and digital platforms. It remains to be seen what other initiatives might emerge.
67 Liam Gillick
68 Claire Hsu
Artist British Last Year 54
Curator Austrian-Chinese Last Year 71
‘Where does Gillick fit? The simple answer is: nowhere’, one reviewer remarked of the British artist/writer’s show earlier this year at Casey Kaplan, New York, in which what looked like hi-tech bar charts were crossbred with minimalist sculpture and accoutred with poetic vinyl wall texts (‘Run to the nearest town…’). Arguably Gillick fits right where he is, obliquely tracking aspects of capitalism’s signal and noise, and, two decades in, still offering up his signature ‘discussion platforms’ as places to talk about it. He’s equally important, though, as a super-connector, at the heart of a network of artists and curators; and, of course, as a prescient thinker. This winter found him opening the yearlong, four-‘movement’ Campaign at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto; spring saw his new book, Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820, tracing two centuries of art’s relation to science, politics and tech. This October he found time to direct the inaugural Okayama Art Summit.
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Art Fair Directors British Last Year 49 / 49 / N ew
Besides cofounding Asia Art Archive (AAA), Asia’s most comprehensive art library, Hsu is one of the region’s foremost cultural figures, sitting on the the museum and acquisition boards of M+, among other advisory roles. The AAA has one of the most valuable collections of recent Asian art history, with more than 69,000 records including audiovisual material, periodicals and catalogues – 85 percent donated – in its open-access library in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. In 2014 it started a website with digitised entries of primary source material across Asia. This year, it continued its 15th anniversary celebrations with a lively series of events under the title Toko Pura-Pura (a pun on ‘assorted shop’ in Indonesian), led by Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, with a popup shop, live music and talks.
ArtReview
65 Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg & Beirut 66 Photo: Jonathan Hökklo. Courtesy Frieze, London 67 Photo: Hiroyasu Matsuo. © Bunks Publishing Bureau 68 Photo: Dave Choi
From his work as the Atlas Group, a fictional collective (the sketchy veracity of which mirrored the impossible concept of ‘truth’ in post-civil war Lebanon), to Raad’s solo show at Museo Jumex, Mexico City (also shown this year at ICA Boston and MoMA, New York), the artist has proved to be one of the most astute interpreters of Arab society and an enduring influence on many other artists in the region for whom the historic archive has become a subject. For the past eight years Raad has turned his attention to the structures of the Arab artworld, both in his studio practice and his participation in the Gulf Labor Coalition (which saw him refused entry to the UAE in 2015). Sculptural works from the ongoing series Scratching on things I could disavow were exhibited in March at Paula Cooper in New York (where he now lives), and the following month he was awarded the ICP’s art photography prize.
69 Thaddaeus Ropac
70 Toby Webster & Andrew Hamilton
Gallerist Austrian Last Year 84
69 Photo: Andrew Phelps 70 Photo: Michael Jones 71 Photo: Musacchio & Ianniello. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, Rome 72 Photo: Alessandro Alberto
In June the gallerist announced he had signed a lease on a five-storey eighteenth-century mansion in London, the refurbishment of which has been trusted to architect Annabelle Selldorf. That won’t be finished until 2017, however, so Ropac had to make do this year with his other four galleries (distributed evenly between Paris and Salzburg). Painters dominate the roster – shows for Imi Knoebel, Liza Lou, Robert Longo and Daniel Richter this year – but Ropac keeps it interesting with more offbeat presentations of his established artists. Architect Peter Marino was drafted in to curate a Robert Mapplethorpe show, a Miquel Barceló exhibition concentrated on the artist’s ceramics and a James Rosenquist show surveyed 50 years of the American artist’s collages. A single work tops the gallerist’s year, however: the centrepiece of the autumn Duchamp show in Paris, the extremely-rare-to-market Porte-Bouteille readymade from 1959, a work bought by Robert Rauschenberg and currently being sold by his estate.
Gallerists British Last Year 50 It’s been a steady 12 months for the two Modern Institute directors, with shows at their two Glasgow spaces including solo presentations by Simon Starling, Cathy Wilkes, Monika Sosnowska and Nicholas Party (Party also had his LA debut show at the Hammer). At the end of 2015 the gallery hosted Kiti Ka’aeté, the second part of its exchange with Brazilian gallery Mendes Wood DM, which featured artists from Brazil, Mexico and Spain. Artists with new books and editions from the gallery’s publishing arm include Shio Kusaka, Ann Collier and Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan. The consistent standard of the gallery’s artists and shows, along with its international outlook and networks, continue to be its strength. This approach comes to the fore during the Glasgow International festival, which took place this past April and of which the gallery is a patron and supporter.
71 Hou Hanru
72 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Museum Director Chinese Last Year Reentry (85 in 2006) Yes, he’s a Chinese guy running one of Italy’s most prestigious museums. But breaking down boundaries has always been part of this independent curator/critic’s MO. The Guangzhou-born Hou has spent most of his life outside China, working as a curator and writer in Paris in the 1990s and then moving to San Francisco in 2006. In 2013 he scored his biggest gig yet: running the Zaha Hadid-designed MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts. While he no doubt has a stake in Chinese contemporary art, his major international shows also showcase his beliefs in cultural hybridity and the ways art is connected to wider society. This year, MAXXI’s eclectic programme ran the gamut from a survey of Turkish art and design to a solo of Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander. Hou’s extracurricular activities are manifold too, including a solo for Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiang for the Shanghai Power Station of Art and a major show of Chinese contemporary art for the Guggenheim next year.
Collector Italian Last Year 77 Collectors’ foundations are ten-a-penny now, but they weren’t when Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo founded hers during the mid-1990s, after a whirlwind introduction to contemporary art several years earlier. She continues to think ahead: her Turin space – ‘more kunsthalle than museum’, she told ArtReview last year – shows an admirable dedication to the risky and the new. She hasn’t shied away from confrontational political art (eg Thomas Hirschhorn), and she supports young artists – this year’s shows at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo included Magali Reus, Adrián Villar Rojas and Ed Atkins, and she’s a strong facilitator of artist commissions – and hosts a residency programme for young curators. Meanwhile, as a patron, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is networked to the hilt: she sits on the international councils of MoMA and Tate, among others.
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Notes on the List
Artist as curator Call it a backlash against the ubiquity of the professional curator (and, to judge from this list, their superior power), but a few biennials and museums, instead of calling on the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist (1) or Massimiliano Gioni (15), have favoured bringing in an artist to curate. So for its first edition, the Okayama Art Summit asked Liam Gillick (67) to be its artistic director; it’s Luc Tuymans (60) taking the reins of the James Ensor show at London’s Royal Academy; Raqs Media Collective (86) will curate the Shanghai Biennale this autumn and winter; and it was Zanele Muholi (95), alongside Walead Beshty, Elad Lassry and Collier Schorr, whom Maja Hoffmann (26) asked to cocurate a show at Luma Arles this year. Kicking this off, perhaps: in 2011, artists Riyas Komu & Bose Krishnamachari (83) were approached by the local government to set up the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
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Gallery gangs Increasingly galleries have been turning to informal networks (they have always more formally shared the representation of artists) to internationalise their influence: utilising those friendships struck up as they are whiling away the quiet hours of an art fair. The Modern Institute (70) is just one of a number of galleries exchanging group exhibitions with international peers, when at the end of last year Mendes Wood DM (91) took over one of its Glasgow spaces, reciprocating the exhibition the Scottish gallery had curated in São Paulo in early 2015. In January Kurimanzutto (32) travelled to San Francisco to stage a show at Jessica Silverman. It’s become a trend: the start of 2016 also saw Condo, a collaborative exhibition featuring younger London galleries playing host to international peers.
The assessment of gender ‘It matters what thoughts think thoughts,’ writes Donna Haraway (43) in her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble. So, for example, even if we are thinking about the environment or climate change, we must do so from a feminist perspective. And if we think about the patriarchy, we must be aware we’re doing so from a position of environmental precarity. Such ideas have anchored much of queer thinking and identity politics of late, not least the intersectional artistic approach of Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable (who have both been championed by Massimiliano Gioni, 15, at the New Museum, New York), Zach Blas or Zanele Muholi (95).
ArtReview
Never meet your heroes What happens when a younger artist, influenced by an older one, begins to catch up with their idol? Luckily, probably not much: the Power 100 may look like a competition, but artists tend not to think like that. But it’s interesting to note that Ragnar Kjartansson (100) has long cited Marina Abramović (46) as an influence, both formally in the Icelandic artist’s use of duration and endurance in his performance works, and conceptually, in the use of emotion and artifice as artistic tools.
73 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo Gallerists Italian Last Year 69
73 Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing & Les Moulins 74 Photo: Heike Göttert. © the artist 75 Photo: Antoine Tempé 76 Photo: Robert Bellamy
Negotiating politically tricky situations is something the trio behind Galleria Continua have become adept at – these are, after all, the guys who have been working with Ai Weiwei since 2009 and operating a Beijing space since 2005 (opened to complement their off-the-beaten-track galleries on Paris’s outskirts and in the Tuscan town of San Gimignano). Yet opening a space in Havana this year is an impressive feat, mixing, no doubt, both ambition and diplomacy. In an interview with ArtReview, Fiaschi noted that while freedom of expression was an issue – ‘that they have this law in these circumstances is something of which I don’t approve’ – they would work within the rules. The result has been a series of exhibitions mixing Cuban names with international artists from the gallery list. Elsewhere, Cuban Carlos Garaicoa showed in the Italian space, Antony Gormley in Beijing, and Daniel Buren and Etel Adnan in France.
74 Olafur Eliasson Artist Danish-Icelandic Last Year 64 You can get critical flak for making art that’s spectacular, but Eliasson is undeterred. Of the many shows of work by the artist in the past year, among them Green light, a much-talked-about refugee project at TBA21 in Vienna, and an exhibition at the Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the artist’s big project for 2016 was his takeover of the Château de Versailles. The centrepiece, among the many works the artist installed in the seventeenth-century palace and its gardens, was a towering waterfall in the latter that seemed to gush from the heavens down into one of the ornamental ponds. There’s a serious point to his crowd-pleasing, however: Eliasson, whether through his artworks or his socially conscious projects, is interested in inspiring political and social change through the work. The bigger the audience, the bigger the effect.
75 Koyo Kouoh
76 Lorenz Helbling
Curator Cameroonian Last Year 73
Gallerist Swiss Last Year Reentry (91 in 2007)
The independent Cameroonian curator continues to expand the discourse around contemporary African art, while also helping to reshape how the artworld is run in the background. Fresh from placing postcolonial politics back in the foreground of the Western consciousness at the EVA International biennial in Limerick, Ireland, in April, Kouoh is overseeing RAW Material Company, the space she founded in Dakar in 2008, expand this autumn to include RAW Academy, an experimental art school. While shaping the talks programme of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York and London, Kouoh was also one of the committee responsible for appointing Documenta 14’s curator, Adam Szymczyk, working at both a micro and macro level internationally.
In 1996, when Chinese contemporary art had virtually no market, this Swiss dealer founded ShanghART from a tiny room in a hotel. Now the gallery has become one of China’s most influential players, with seven spaces in Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore. At Helbling’s galleries, you can encounter the long, poetic tableaux of filmmaker Yang Fudong, provocative sculptures of Xu Zhen from MadeIn Company and diaristic snaps by Birdhead. Not to mention senior pioneers such as Ding Yi, Zhang Enli and Xue Song. Helbling reappears on the list after a burst of activity. This year ShanghART moves out of its Moganshan space in Shanghai to a larger building in a swanky new art district in West Bund. And during the summer The Crocodile in the Pond saw 11 of the galleries artists exhibiting at the Abby St Urban in Lucerne. It has also been slowly dipping a toe into the Southeast Asian pool, signing on Palme d’Or-winning Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui.
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78 Vincent Worms
Gallerist Korean Last Year 82
Collector French Last Year New
This twinkly-eyed dealer, collector and all-round grande dame of the Korean art scene has had a solid Year of the Monkey, with her gallery Kukje (meaning ‘international’ in Korean) sticking to what’s familiar and what works. This involves mounting solos for international artworld stars such as Anish Kapoor, currently showing recent works and his classic concave discs (Gathering Clouds, 2014), and Korea’s blue-chip names, including abstract artist Kim Hong Joo and Dansaekhwa master Chung Chang-Sup. The gallery, which also represents a midcareer generation of Korean artists such as Haegue Yang and Kimsooja, continues to promote the work of emerging practitioners. Its edgy summer show, Wellknown Unknown, featured experimental artists and collectives that work between disciplines, such as Min Oh, an artist influenced by design and music, and Kim Heecheon, an architect making artworks that reflect on urban experience.
From its gallery in San Francisco, and its project space and office in Paris, the influence of Kadist, the nonprofit private art foundation of which Worms is chairman, spreads globally. Collecting art is one side of Kadist’s work, something it does through mainly geographic-led strands: under the banner ‘A3’, for example, and with advice from MAXXI artistic director Hou Hanru, the foundation invests in art from the Asia-Pacific region; ‘El Sur’ concentrates on art from Latin America; and ‘101’ traces narratives through American art from 1970 (the last two are directed by curator Jens Hoffmann). The other major areas of activity are residencies (Shooshie Sulaiman in Paris and Yin-Ju Chen in San Francisco this year), commissioning and programming, and not just at its own space: this year, Worms bankrolled Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs, a group show curated by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila and Para Site in Hong Kong.
79 Eugenio López
80 Christopher Wool
Collector Mexican Last Year 66
Artist American Last Year 59
An art collection – and the museum that holds it – should be a portal for future generations to access our own age, López says. Whether Museo Jumex offers that is yet to be seen: 2015 was a tumultuous year that saw accusations of censorship at the newly opened museum and the departure of its inaugural director. In the absence of a replacement being named, chief curator Julieta González continues to serve as interim director. It was perhaps an odd move too for a Mexican institution to take on a Guggenheim-curated touring show on Latin American art (Pablo León de la Barra’s Under the Same Sun), and the homegrown The Natural Order of Things received mixed reviews. Hosting solo shows for Jose Dávila and Walid Raad points to a welcome direction, however, for the man who remains one of Latin America’s most important collectors.
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When bond managers cite your text paintings on the TV news (that’ll be Jeffrey Gundlach, the chief executive of DoubleLine Capital, quoting Wool’s line in the 1988 work Apocalypse Now, ‘Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids’, in reference to Deutsche Bank shares), you know that your practice has a certain cultural, and dare we say economic, standing. Those working in the very top end of financial services might be the types to own one of Wool’s works after all: Apocalypse Now sparked column inches in 2013 when it sold for $26.4m at auction. More to the point, though, Wool as a painter represents a progression from the medium’s obsessions with formalism (though don’t think for a moment his deceptively simple compositions aren’t heavily worked) into conceptualism: his distinctly painterly investigations of the relationship between language and image reverberate, not least in the work of big shots such as Josh Smith and Wade Guyton from a generation below.
ArtReview
77 Photo: nk_Park @ PENN Studio. Courtesy: Kukje Gallery, Seoul 78 Courtesy Kadist, Paris & San Francisco 79 Courtesy Museo Jumex, Mexico City 80 Photo: Aubrey Mayer
77 Hyun-Sook Lee
82 Trevor Paglen
School Director British-American Last Year 70
Artist American Last Year 83
When not touring journalists round his toy-soldier collection (while Tony Oursler ‘hung out in the next room tinkering on the curator’s piano’), coprogramming the talks at Frieze New York or conducting interviews for this magazine, Eccles passes wisdom to the curatorial students of Bard College in upstate New York. In doing so, the former director of the Public Art Fund in New York has shaped the fledging ideas of exhibition-makers who have dispersed globally. This year at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art (which Eccles initiated ten years ago), he cocurated, with Lauren Cornell, the expansive group show Invisible Adversaries, built around the eponymous film by VALIE EXPORT. The show also included the work of Liam Gillick, with whom Eccles is an adviser to Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation (alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf). Eccles also sits on the board of the Keith Haring Foundation and notably, given his role in New York cultural life over the past 20 years, became a US citizen this year.
83 Riyas Komu & Bose Krishnamachari
84 Katie Hollander & Nato Thompson
Artists Indian Last Year 86
Curators American Last Year New
After a rocky start, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has bedded in, no doubt to the relief of its artist founders, Bose Krishnamachari (who this year also found time to curate the inaugural Yinchuan Biennale, which opened this September minus the work of one Ai Weiwei) and Riyas Komu. For the second edition, in 2014, the pair (based in Mumbai but born in Kerala, where the biennale is held) handed the curatorial reins to another artist, Jitish Kallat, whose adept thematic considerations of time, mapping and lost histories, not to mention smart crowdfunding, left optimism in the show’s wake concerning the autonomy of the Indian artworld. For its successor, which opens in December, Krishnamachari and Komu have tapped, yes, another artist, Sudarshan Shetty.
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In 2014 the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organisation set up to defend civil liberties in the digital world, awarded Paglen one of its Pioneer Awards, for being a ‘groundbreaking investigative artist’. It’s a title that more than suits the American artist, writer and geographer, whose work makes visible the often secret technologies and state activities that impact on our lives. Projects include using tracking data to photograph the night sky at the time and location of classified American satellite transmissions, and photographing the very physical network of undersea Internet cables that traverse the oceans, transporting our digital data – cables which are quite possibly also being tapped by the NSA and others. This year Paglen’s work was included in Manifesta 11, Electronic Superhighway at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and L’image volée (The Stolen Image) at Fondazione Prada in Milan, among others. In June he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
For six weeks over the summer a small audience gathered in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. As dusk fell, thousands of pigeons, each with a small LED light tagged to one leg, rose up. They flew in synchronised gangs to the delight of those assembled below. Duke Riley’s Fly By Night performances are the kind of accessible public art events that Creative Time, the nonprofit organisation where Hollander and Thompson are executive director and artistic director respectively, has become known for producing. If Riley’s work was a crowd-pleaser, there’s a serious political and social side to the organisation too, exemplified by Creative Time Reports, a digital platform from which artists offer their perspectives on global current affairs and the annual Creative Time Summit, which this year takes place in Washington, DC, and discusses the subject of grassroots movements, including Black Lives Matter.
ArtReview
81 Courtesy LUMA Foundation, Zürich 82 Photo: Trevor Paglen Studio 83 Courtesy the artists 84 Courtesy Creative Time, New York
81 Tom Eccles
85 Anselm Franke 85 Photo: Stephanie Pilick 86 Photo: Amalia Jyran Dasgupta 87 Courtesy Long Museum, Shanghai 88 Photo: Christopher Boeckheler
86 Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Curator German Last Year 58 Back in 2012, Franke said that he conceived his Animism project to question the story of modernity, wanting to ‘break free from the “frame” of colonial modernity and its narratives’, a theme that is further explored in The Interrupted Survey: Fractured Modern Mythologies, now in the middle of a two-year run at Gwangju’s Asia Cultural Center. The head of visual arts and film at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), his recent exhibition Nervous Systems, part of HKW’s ‘100 Years of Now’ programme and curated in collaboration with Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski from the Tactical Technology Centre, sought to ‘explore the impact of data economies and the quantification of life on our understanding of the social’. Including works such as !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s Delivery for Mr. Assange – Assange’s Room – an example of how data is used as a weapon by governments and those who question them – it (arguably) went further than the DIS-curated Berlin Biennale in questioning the conditions of our present world.
Artists Indian Last Year New Joining the trend for artists curating biennials are Raqs Media Collective (‘raqs’ being the term for the state that whirling dervishes enter into), the collaborative artistic practice formed by Bagchi, Narula and Sengupta in 1992, who in November open their edition of the 11th Shanghai Biennale. The New Delhi-based trio have titled it Why Not Ask Again? Manoeuvres, Disputations and Stories. While they have curated previously (including Manifesta 7 in 2008), they’re just as likely to pull on their copious experience as regular exhibitors on the biennial circuit, not least this year, with work appearing at the 11th Gwangju Biennale and the 20th Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala. That, plus their continuing involvement in Sarai, the urbanism research platform that the trio cofounded in 2000 at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Dervishes indeed.
87 Wang Wei & Liu Yiqian
88 Philippe Pirotte
Collectors Chinese Last Year New
School Director Belgian Last Year 85
Husband-and-wife Liu and Wang are the most conspicuous Chinese art collectors in the world, making waves for a $170m purchase of Modigliani’s Nu couché (1917–18) at Christie’s last year – the second most expensive artwork ever sold at an auction. This year, Liu (once photographed sipping tea from a $36m Ming dynasty cup shortly after he’d put it on his American Express) continues with his, er, refreshingly honest ways. Earlier this year he uploaded a picture of himself standing in front of Gerhard Richter’s 11m-wide 930-7 Strip (2015) on social media platform WeChat – a purchase Artnet News later confirmed. With an estimated fortune of $1.29b, taxidriver-turned-tycoon Liu is chairman of Sunline Group, which has investments in chemicals, pharmaceuticals and financial services. In 2012, he and his wife set up the private Long Museum, which has two branches in Shanghai, where they are based. This year they opened a new outpost in Chongqing in Southwest China, a metropolis of over 30 million people.
An art historian, critic and curator, Pirotte has been rector of the influential Städelschule in Frankfurt since 2014. Teaching colleagues include Peter Fischli, Douglas Gordon, Micheal Krebber, Wolfgang Tillmans and Tobias Rehberger. With the Städelschule role comes the directorship of the university gallery Portikus, where exhibitions this year have included Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Amy Sillman (the school’s professor of painting), Shahryar Nashat and Lawrence Abu Hamdan. In 2016, however, Pirotte flexed his curatorial muscles (in addition to his continued advisory role to the Kadist collection, in Paris) on a far bigger project, La Biennale de Montréal, which he’s titled Le Grand Balcon, a reference to Jean Genet’s 1957 play Le Balcon. Favouring a younger generation, the biennial includes Nashat again, together with the likes of Luke Willis Thompson and Haig Aivazian, with room for some more ‘seasoned’ players as well, not least Thomas Bayrle and the curator’s compatriot Luc Tuymans.
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Age
Power 100, 2006–16, split between those aged 45 and under, and those 46 and over. Graph represents the percentage value, with raw values shown alongside. Value is assigned per individual, not per entry on the list
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89 Courtesy Project Row Houses, Houston 90 Photo: Lea Crespi / Figarophoto.com. Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, Brussels & London 91 Photo: Paulo Giandaglia. Courtesy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo 92 Photo: Reto Guntli. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich
89 Rick Lowe
90 Almine Rech
Artist American Last Year 89
Gallerist French Last Year New
Given the extent to which they are part of the fabric of a city, Rick Lowe’s artworks don’t travel as easily as those created by other artists on this list, but the Houston-based former painter and his Joseph Beuys-inspired ‘social sculptures’ are increasingly influential (not least with artists like Theaster Gates). His lifework Project Row Houses (1993–) is a conversion, with the help of local artists, of six blocks of shotgun dwellings in Houston’s Third Ward neighbourhood into 40 houses blending arts venues, studios and a community centre. Subsequent projects have taken place in Los Angeles, Dallas, Florida, New Orleans, South Carolina and more. Appointed by President Obama to the National Council of the Arts in 2013, bestowed with a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ the following year, the avatar of artistic urban renewal spent part of this year in Athens, working on a project (likely immigration-related, he told ArtReview this past summer) for next year’s Documenta.
Not content with running three spaces in Paris, Brussels and London, and directing with her husband the eponymous Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Para el Arte, the French dealer has been busy preparing for the October opening of two new galleries: an additional 225sqm space in London’s Grosvenor Hill, and a 280sqm outpost in New York, which is to be spearheaded by her son, Paul de Froment. Although the inaugural New York show will be Calder and Picasso (another family connection here), the move to the US feels like a natural step for Rech, whose roster has been increasingly American, with the likes of Julian Schnabel, Brian Calvin, Justin Adian and Blair Thurman receiving solo shows with the gallery in the past year. As for her London gallery’s inauguration (during the Frieze art fair), it took the form of an exhibition by Jeff Koons.
91 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood
92 Eva Presenhuber
Gallerists Brazilian / Brazilian / American Last Year 93
While there’s never a year when Zürich isn’t important to the artworld – such is the buying power of the city’s collectors, both individual and corporate – the presence of Manifesta 11 in Presenhuber’s hometown further ensured that anyone going to Art Basel (on whose selection committee she sits) would pass through at some point during the summer. Indeed, one of the most eye-catching projects at the biennial was the placement of work by Torbjørn Rødland, represented by the gallery, in a local dentist’s surgery and in the group show at LUMA Westbau. During the biennial’s preview, Presenhuber also opened solo shows by Rødland along with Walead Beshty across her two gallery spaces and unveiled two outdoor sculptures by Mark Handforth nearby. A week earlier at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, an exhibition partnering gallery artists Fischli / Weiss and Alexander Calder had opened. In the end, though, what might seem a busy summer for some was just business as usual for Presenhuber.
Mendes Wood DM’s modus operandi has been to take relatively young artists – initially many who were fairly unknown outside of Brazil – and tirelessly promote them internationally. The fruits of this slog can now be found in the presence of artists such as Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Paulo Nazareth, Lucas Arruda and Paulo Nimer Pjota in various institutional and biennial exhibitions over the past 12 months. The gallery however is also expanding the remit: the burgeoning careers of Michael Dean and Neïl Beloufa have also been keeping them busy. September saw the opening of a New York viewing space for the gallery, in partnership with Michael Werner, and the trio are set to open an exhibition space in a Brussels townhouse in April 2017. Oh, and true to their work-hard, play-hard spirit, they now also co-own a bar in São Paulo.
Gallerist Austrian-Swiss Last Year 68
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94 Eugene Tan
Artist Japanese Last Year 53
Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 99
The global domination of eighty-seven-year-old Kusama’s touring, Instagram-friendly brand of immersive Infinity Mirror Room installations, spotty pumpkin sculptures, floating steel spheres and minimalist, repeat-motif Infinity Net paintings has continued in 2016 and shows no sign of slowing down. Institutional exhibitions this year were accorded to her by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Glass House, Connecticut, Helsinki Art Museum and the Sharjah Art Foundation. Kusama’s 2016 exhibition at Victoria Miro gallery in London attracted nearly 69,000 visitors, most of whom had to queue. Though Kusama still ranks as the highest-selling living female artist, she isn’t just about the figures – audience or price. She also comes with a pedigree of film and orchestrated happenings and performance in New York during the 1960s and 70s that was every bit as avant-garde as Warhol.
It may be called the ‘Little Red Dot’ in Asia, but rich, compact Singapore has no shortage of public monies rolling into the arts, and the country’s largest, swankiest and most ambitious of art museums is the National Gallery. Its head honcho, Eugene Tan, who was on this list in 2013 and 2015, has made the list again in 2016 for steering the gallery through a power-packed opening year, with exhibitions that explored Singapore’s art history and Southeast Asian identities, as well as forging international partnerships with institutions such as the Centre Pompidou and Tate Britain. Since the gallery opened last November, significant showcases have included Siapa Nama Kamu? (What Is Your Name?), a brisk walk through Singaporean and Southeast Asian art from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as solo exhibitions of the late Chinese ink master Wu Guanzhong and the Lion City’s own ink representative Chua Ek Kay (Beauty Beyond Form; After The Rain).
95 Zanele Muholi
96 Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani
Artist South African Last Year New
Collectors Bangladeshi Last Year 98
The Johannesburg-based photographer, filmmaker and self-titled ‘visual activist’ is at the forefront of both celebrating the existence of, and campaigning against the violence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex communities in her native South Africa and beyond. Cofounder of the Forum for Empowerment of Women and founder of the Inkanyiso forum for queer media, her 2015 solo exhibition Isibonelo/ Evidence, at New York’s Brooklyn Museum, included 87 images from her uncompromising portrait series Faces and Phases (2006–14) led to her being shortlisted for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2016 she was the recipient of an Annual Infinity Award from New York’s ICP. With work in this year’s Berlin Biennale and at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival; a cocurating gig at Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation in the same city; and group shows and lectures lined up in the US, Norway and Mauritius, Muholi is making sure her message is being heard.
There was a local art scene in Bangladesh before the Samdanis, but the couple are the ones that swung a spotlight on it. The third biennial Dhaka Art Summit was held in February and, under the direction of foundation curator Diana Campbell Betancourt, was its usual hybrid of solo shows, commissions, gallery presentations, talks and panel discussions. The summit pulls in international artworld types (Para Site’s Cosmin Costinas, the Pompidou’s Catherine David and Stedelijk Museum director Beatrix Ruf were among the judges of the Samdani Art Award, for example, won by Rasel Chowdhury for his photography series tracing the railway line from Jamalpur to Dhaka) and puts art and discourse from the region under their noses. Privately the Samdanis collect (mainly South Asian art, but with some Western names sprinkled through too), and the pair are busy working on the 2018 opening of the country’s first contemporary art museum, in Sylhet, a city in northeast Bangladesh.
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93 Yayoi Kusama, Portrait, 2014. © the artist. Photo: Noriko Takasugi. Courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo & Singapore, and Victoria Miro, London 94 Courtesy National Gallery Singapore 95 © the artist. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg 96 Photo: Jenni Carter. Courtesy Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation
93 Yayoi Kusama
97 Photo: Kris McKay. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York 98 Courtesy Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow 99 Licensed under Creative Commons: Ayberksz is 100 Photo: Elisabet Davids
97 Pablo León de la Barra
98 Dasha Zhukova
Curator Mexican Last Year New
Collector Russian-American Last Year 97
Given de la Barra’s natural restless energy, an institutional directorship was a surprising move, and indeed the curator’s tenure at Rio de Janeiro’s Casa França-Brasil was shorter than perhaps expected (appointed in January 2015, he left the role this autumn). More de la Barra’s style is the itinerant and relentless exploration and promotion of the region’s art scene that saw him appointed curator for the Guggenheim’s ‘Global Art Initiative’ in 2013. The major outcome of that was the geographical survey Under the Same Sun, which showed at South London Gallery this summer, having toured from the Guggenheim via Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Packed in alongside this was his cocurating of SITElines.2016, the second instalment of SITE Santa Fe’s biennial, and his role as one of 11 ‘curatorial attachés’ who will help shape the 12th Biennale of Sydney. One can’t help but feel that if you’re a young Latin American artist, de la Barra would be a good man to meet.
In 2015 Zhukova’s Garage Center opened with great fanfare in its Rem Koolhaas-renovated Moscow home. Since then it’s hosted shows by Urs Fischer and Taryn Simon; new commissions by Rashid Johnson and Yin Xiuzhen, and a group exhibition made in collaboration with disabled professionals, featuring work by Cindy Sherman, Rob Pruitt and others. Garage is Moscow’s go-to destination for contemporary art, but with work already underway on the V-A-C Foundation’s vast Renzo Piano-designed exhibition space (in the former GES2 power plant), scheduled to open in 2019, it won’t have that monopoly for long. Zhukova however isn’t sitting on her laurels. In July, New York digital media company Vice bought a controlling stake in the Center’s Garage magazine, and aims to expand the publication’s global reach and produce its own digital channel.
99 Ömer Koç
100 Ragnar Kjartansson
Collector Turkish Last Year New
Artist Icelandic Last Year New
The purpose of biennials can be questioned, but when a country experiences the kind of turbulence that Turkey has in 2016, with its arts scene coming under increasing political pressure (see, for instance, the cancelation of this year’s Çanakkale Biennial), it helps for artists to have friends in high places. Koç, deputy chairman of the board at multi-industry conglomerate Koç Holdings, has long extended his private passion of art collecting into patronage, not least committing to sponsoring the Istanbul Biennial for 20 years, from 2007 to 2026. The company, on Koç’s behest, also partly bankrolls Turkey’s participation in the Venice Biennale, sponsors the International Nasreddin Hodja Cartoon Contest and, in 2010, established the nonprofit exhibition space Arter. During an attempted coup by elements of the Turkish military in July, the gallery was showing Not All That Falls Has Wings, a philosophical group show musing on the act of falling.
In the past 12 months, the charismatic endurance-singer, -painter and -performer has extended his cultlike following to the good people of Montreal, Chicago, Buffalo, New York, Detroit, Copenhagen, London and Paris. Kjartansson’s seductive films and happenings contain complex questions concerning authenticity and the role of the romantic in art (an age-old one, admittedly), quoting structuralism, avant-garde theatre and the narrative traditions of Iceland along the way. Yet while there is more than enough for art critics to sink their teeth into, what has really won him fans across these cities and led The Guardian to note him as ‘one of the most brilliant artists at work today’ is that, like a really great pop song, a Kjartansson show can pull you through an emotional mill and back again.
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The 2016 Power 100
1 Hans Ulrich Obrist
35 François Pinault
69 Thaddaeus Ropac
2 Adam Szymczyk
36 Rirkrit Tiravanija
70 Toby Webster & Andrew Hamilton
3 Iwan & Manuela Wirth
37 Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood
71 Hou Hanru
4 David Zwirner
5 Nicholas Serota & Frances Morris
6 Larry Gagosian 7 Hito Steyerl 8 Adam D. Weinberg 9 Wolfgang Tillmans 10 Ai Weiwei 11 Beatrix Ruf 12 Glenn D. Lowry 13 Marian Goodman 14 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
38 Dakis Joannou 39 Daniel Buchholz 40 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi 41 Bernard Arnault 42 Gerhard Richter 43 Donna Haraway 44 Emmanuel Perrotin 45 Miuccia Prada 46 Marina Abramović 47 Isa Genzken 48 Sheena Wagstaff
72 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo 73 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo 74 Olafur Eliasson 75 Koyo Kouoh 76 Lorenz Helbling 77 Hyun-Sook Lee 78 Vincent Worms 79 Eugenio López 80 Christopher Wool 81 Tom Eccles 82 Trevor Paglen
15 Massimiliano Gioni
49 Christine Tohmé
16 Theaster Gates
50 Ed Atkins
17 Christine Macel
51 Klaus Biesenbach
18 Bernard Blistène & Serge Lasvignes
52 Richard Chang
84 Nato Thompson & Katie Hollander
53 Barbara Gladstone
85 Anselm Franke
54 Adrian Cheng
86 Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta
19 Marc & Arne Glimcher 20 Okwui Enwezor 21 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 22 Marc Spiegler 23 Eli & Edythe Broad 24 Pierre Huyghe
55 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang 56 Esther Schipper 57 Luisa Strina 58 Matthew Marks
25 Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
59 Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider
26 Maja Hoffmann
60 Luc Tuymans
27 Gavin Brown
61 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
28 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty
62 William Kentridge
29 Thelma Golden 30 Jeff Koons 31 Sadie Coles
63 Charles Esche 64 Massimo De Carlo 65 Walid Raad
83 Riyas Komu & Bose Krishnamachari
87 Wang Wei & Liu Yiqian 88 Philippe Pirotte 89 Rick Lowe 90 Almine Rech 91 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood 92 Eva Presenhuber 93 Yayoi Kusama 94 Eugene Tan 95 Zanele Muholi 96 Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani 97 Pablo León de la Barra
32 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto
66 Matthew Slotover, Amanda Sharp & Victoria Siddall
33 Jay Jopling
67 Liam Gillick
99 Ömer Koç
34 Michael Govan
68 Claire Hsu
100 Ragnar Kjartansson
November 2016
98 Dasha Zhukova
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On the Couch Over the years ArtReview has done a number of interviews about its Power list, but never before in its own magazine… Interview by an angry therapist
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Are you sitting comfortably? No. Normally it’s ArtReview that gets to ask the questions. It doesn’t really like things this way round. Tough. I think we really need to talk about some issues surrounding your list. This Power 100 business – ranking and measuring – it’s really all about an art magazine investing itself with a power it doesn’t actually have. There aren’t even any art critics on your list, for goodness’ sake! There are very few art critics who can claim to have the kind of global influence that most of the people on ArtReview’s list display. Language, geographic practicalities and the economics of being a writer take care of that. But to go back to the main question, in this case ArtReview is an observer, not an enforcer. For this one issue ,it keeps its own ideas to itself. As much as it possibly can. And there’s very little power in that. You know that last bit’s not true. ArtReview can’t control other people’s perceptions of what it does. Maybe the list is only an instrument of power in and of itself because other people think it is. If ArtReview is powerful in all this, it’s only because it takes this listmaking seriously and provides something in which its readers and other commentators believe. That’s the problem with all this art business! It always comes down to abstract things like beliefs. You can’t make a ranked list based on that. Sometimes the very pleasure of looking at an artwork can lie in its ability to let you escape the tyranny of fact that so much of the rest of our lives are lived under. You seem a bit too angry to appreciate that, however. Maybe it’s best to say that belief or the ways in which we are taught to perceive the world around us can be one of the most powerful forces when it comes to manipulating social groups or encouraging people to think in a certain way. Your list is made by a secret cabal of judges. We never know their names. Why all the secrecy? ArtReview’s panel is made up of people representing almost every artworld ‘type’: artists, curators, critics and sometimes even collectors (but they normally want to be on the list, and if you’re on the panel you can’t be on the list). We keep them anonymous to protect them from undue pressure and influence, and so that their bosses, collaborators or coworkers don’t fire or ostracise them upon learning that they themselves have not made the list.
So much for openness and transparency, then. ArtReview is just being realistic. The artworld has never been particularly good when it comes to openness and transparency. That’s one of the reasons ArtReview began making this list in the first place. So you make this list to reveal the hidden network of power in art, but then hide the names of your panellists? Isn’t that what most people would call a contradiction? ArtReview is not completely blind to the contradiction or irony in its last reply. It’s an entertainer, after all. Isn’t your annual list simply another entertainment you provide? All those people sliding up and down, on and off an imaginary greasy pole that’s an invention of your own twisted mind? Perhaps ArtReview’s list does include evaluations that in the long term should be seen as provisional, but that’s in the nature of any attempt to assess what’s going on in the tiny space of the contemporary, the right now. As it has said elsewhere, that’s why ArtReview restates its list every year – you should read the introduction text for more on that. Most of the top ten never change, though. Power doesn’t change hands that fast. That’s the reality of things. But actually if you compare this year’s list to one from ten or 15 years ago, you’ll find that that top ten has changed a lot. I’ve seen all those ads at the front of your magazine – your list is just a marketing tool and then a record of people who advertise with you, isn’t it? Have you been talking to ArtReview’s publisher again? You seem to be articulating his wildest dreams. Many of the people on the list don’t advertise with ArtReview and many of the advertisers aren’t on it. Those last people must hate you. They’re a bit more sophisticated than that. But there’s no denying that over the years this listing business, while wildly popular with its readers and the global media, has lost ArtReview one or two potential friends. Sounds like making this list is a display of suicidal tendencies, then – everyone knows that success in the artworld lies in creating intricate networks of supporters and friends. Sounds like you’re confusing artworld success with Tate, there. There are as many ways to achieve success in art as there are to skin a cat.
November 2016
Some however may be more efficient or straightforward than others. Your first name is Art, so why aren’t artists always top of your list? After all, as you doubtless keep hearing at all those gallery dinners you go to, art is nothing without them. It’s where the whole industry begins, no matter where it ends up. The Power 100 is about those people influencing what art gets shown and why – about why certain types of art reach a public, through exhibitions, media exposure and suchlike. Artists don’t often get to make the decisions about all that. The list is really about how an artwork navigates its way in the world around it; it’s definitively not about who’s the best artist, otherwise Bruce Nauman would be number one in ArtReview’s eyes each and every year. I thought you were all about dispassion and a lack of fear or favour. Only in the Power 100 issue. Every other issue is entirely about what ArtReview and its writers do or do not favour. Sometimes it’s also about our fears for the direction of art. You didn’t challenge me on the use of industry in that last-but-one question. Is art an industry in your eyes? In the sense that art is about the transformation of raw materials (whether they be material or not) into goods that can be consumed (whether economically or intellectually), perhaps that is the case. Industry and capital do go together, after all, and there’s a lot of capital in contemporary art right now. Go to an art fair and you’ll find out. But now’s not the time to get all Marxist on your ass. The power issue doesn’t really address the idea of labourers and masters in the big game of art. But in other issues of its magazine, ArtReview has plenty to say about that. You sound remarkably cocky. Do you ever have any regrets? ArtReview saw Philippe Parreno’s incredible installation at Tate Modern just after the list closed. ArtReview felt it might be a bit of a game-changer in terms of how an artwork and an audience interact. Had it seen it before, it would have used its position on the power panel to advocate for his inclusion near the top. But the annual nature of this list means that anything that might seem like a cause for regret is merely ammunition for next year’s power debate. Next year’s panellists can look forward to being Parreno-ed in the face.
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ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng, a new initiative, brings special projects by leading artists from around the world to locations inside and outside the West Bund Art Center, Shanghai, 9–13 November
Wang Yi Aike-Dellarco Jin Shan Bank Bosco Sodi Blain | Southern Qiu Anxiong Boers-Li Gallery Zhang Peili Boers-Li Gallery Zhang Ruyi Don Gallery Laurent Grasso Edouard Malingue Gallery Philippe Parreno Gladstone Gallery Lu Zhengyuan Hive Center for Contemporary Art Christopher Orr Ibid Gallery Merlin James Kerlin Gallery Simon Dybbroe Møller Laura Bartlett Gallery Haroon Mirza Lisson Gallery Hao Jingfang & Wang Lingjie M Art Center Wang Shang Magician Space Sion Sono OTA Fine Arts Qiu Xiaofei Pace Gallery Shanzhai Biennial Project Native Informant Bagus Pandega ROH Projects Sean Scully Timothy Taylor Yutaka Sone Tommy Simoens Bi Rongrong Vanguard Gallery Yi Xin Tong Vanguard Gallery imagokinetics
West Bund Art Center 2555 Longteng Avenue, Shanghai www.westbundshanghai.com 147 f00% BLACK
A History of Power In the art game there are five kinds of players. Here player number five – the writer – places himself alongside the artist, collector, dealer and curator by Martin Gayford
In 1512, every connoisseur also artists. One might argue in Rome was impressed by a that some sixteenth-century notable new piece of contempatrons – Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, for example, and porary art. One commentator his sister Isabella, marchioness reported that Pope Julius II had of Mantua – were embryonic covered the vault of the Sistine curators. They were not simply Chapel with fine frescoes. To amassing works, they were some, therefore, at least in the sixteenth century, all credit for arranging displays in which the an artwork went to the patron. styles of various masters could Power in the artworld, and be compared and contrasted: everywhere else for that matter, a sort of proto-exhibition. is a slippery thing; it can slither away through time. Half a millenFast-forward to the artworld of a century or so ago – the era of the nium later, Julius II is remembered almost entirely as a result of the Impressionists and early Modernism – and the structure of power and influence had become more complex. The biggest development fact he once employed Raphael and Michelangelo. The art game, however, has acquired more players since then. The was the rise of the dealer. One of the big disasters in the career of late critic, curator and collector David Sylvester used to claim that, Paul Gauguin, for example, was the death of Van Gogh – Theo, that is, for it to function properly, five different roles needed to be filled: the not Vincent. artist, the collector, the dealer, the museum curator and the writer. In Theo van Gogh, Gauguin felt – quite correctly – he had what Of these, 500 years ago, only the first two really existed. Or perhaps it he needed: a dealer who believed in his talent, and would nurture it, would be more accurate to say the other activities had not yet split off seeking out collectors who might be interested in his work, arranging into distinctive roles. exhibitions and publicity, advancing money to Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II, 1511, support him during thin times. It was a serious The first great and influential writer-critics oil on poplar wood, 109 × 81 cm. Photo: National setback for Gauguin when Theo died in 1891. – Giorgio Vasari and Leon Battista Alberti – were Gallery, London. Licensed to public domain
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By that date, the dealer had become crucial. The careers and fame of by arranging exhibitions than through their words. Germano Celant the earlier generation of Impressionists owed much to Paul Durand- invented the term ‘Arte Povera’ in 1967, and wrote about the subject, Ruel, that of Picasso to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. This was connected but most significantly organised the first exhibition of that group. with the proliferation of private collectors of art. Dealers provided It seems to have been partly exhibiting together – and being given a collective name – that brought the artists involved together. A colleca nexus between artists and new markets opening up for their work. Around 1900, at least in contemporary art, the role of the museum tive display made connections visible. curator was less crucial – the reason being that there was a greater The big shift over the past few decades has been the rise of two time lag before new art entered the collections of museums and groups that did not exist in 1500, and were much less prominent even public art galleries. Arrival in the Louvre would be the climax of a in 1900 or 1950: the contemporary art dealer and the contemporary French artist’s career; there was no nineteenth-century equivalent museum director/curator. The top end of ArtReview’s 2015 Power 100 to the career retrospective that played such a role in the ascent to fame contained a few artists – Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramović, Jeff Koons – but of a Francis Bacon or a Gerhard Richter. was largely made up of prominent dealers and public gallery officials. True, there were movers and shakers in institutions who had an It seems likely the same will be true in 2016 – or 2020, for that matter. influence comparable to that of – say – This is, of course, the result of two The writer, never the most powerful Nicholas Serota in late-twentieth- and profound developments over the past few decades: the vast proliferation early-twenty-first-century London. But of the players, has become of the contemporary art market, and like Wilhelm von Bode, founder and less prominent still, a reflection that the rise of the imperial ‘museum of first curator of the Kaiser Friedrich the public gets its orientation Museum (today the Bode Museum) the new’. in Berlin, they operated in the area of During the early eleventh cenincreasingly from museums and tury, a Burgundian chronicler named Old Masters. temporary exhibitions Radulfus Glaber noted that recently The art museum was a nineteenthcentury invention; Robert Hughes suggested that it replaced the a ‘white mantle of churches’ seemed to have been rising over ‘all the church in the centre of American towns. But the museum of new art earth’. An early-twenty-first-century successor would have noticed a was the invention of a later year. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, similar wave of contemporary art museums and museum extensions New York, was founded in 1870; the Museum of Modern Art almost springing up around much of the world. Simultaneously, a rather 60 years later, in 1929. similar – in fact, architecturally often interchangeable – crop of megaThe writer-curator, however, could be crucial in orchestrating the commercial galleries continues to appear far and wide (White Cube’s shock of the new. Roger Fry articulated a new taste that could accom- Bermondsey location in London being a striking example of a space modate Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse. But he had a much bigger equal in every way to many a public museum). effect on British public taste through his two Postimpressionist exhiA paradoxical effect of these two developments is a slight sidebitions at the Grafton Galleries, London, of 1910 and 1912. ‘On or about lining of the artist and collector. We cannot really play the art game December 1910,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘human character changed.’ without either, but neither seems to make the weather in quite the The cultural earthquake she had in mind was the coming of the way they did only a decade or two ago. This is partly perhaps because modern age, and the reason she chose December 1910 was that Fry’s art, while continuing to be ‘new’, no longer seems to alter in the Manet and the Post-Impressionists ran from November that year to the concerted fashion it once did. following January. There has not been a movement defined by a collective name, Changing human character – or the zeitgeist – is certainly a mani- a stylistic affinity since Arte Povera in the late 1960s and 70s, and Neo-Expressionism in the 1980s. The festation of power, and it is notable We cannot really play the art game era of -isms seems to be over, although that the feat was, to Woolf’s mind, there are networks and regional nodes accomplished through an exhibiwithout the artist and collector, tion. The Armory Show in New York of activity. but neither seems to make the in 1913 set off a similar detonation, These are some of the factors that introducing the American public to have – for the moment at least – transweather in quite the way they did the Postimpressionists, Fauvists and ferred power to the curator, whether only a decade or two ago Cubists, and – causing the greatest in a public or a private gallery. The curator selects from far and wide, and controls what is presented kerfuffle – Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). The writer, never the most powerful of the five art players, has to the world. Even major collectors, such as Eli Broad and François become less prominent in the decades since then. This probably Pinault, have made their presences felt by opening private museums reflects that the art public gets its orientation much more – and (Damien Hirst, an artist/collector, is doing the same with his Newport increasingly – from museums and, especially, temporary exhibitions, Street Gallery in London). which began in the late nineteenth century, and have become ever Will power continue to rest with dealers and curators? Could the Internet transform the way that art is bought and sold, and even more important in recent decades. There have been cases in which the artistic climate has been how it is experienced, as it has revolutionised so many other areas? affected by words – the influence of Clement Greenberg on American Will new technologies, such as the art-buying app devised by Magnus abstraction comes to mind. In general, however, over the last half- Resch, alter the rules, and even the players, of the art game? If so, century, when writers have had a galvanising effect it has been more the patterns of power may start to shift again. ar
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(Inter)national collections With public funding in retreat, national museums are tapping private donors abroad. How great an idea is that? by Thomas Forwood
Pablo Helguera, from Artoons, 2009. © the artist
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The predominant narrative within global politics at the moment Vegas to Berlin to Salzburg, fail. The projected Guggenheim Helsinki circulates around the apparent necessity of choosing between nation- is in a precarious position, with the Finnish government having alism and internationalism. For the world’s ever-more-popular isola- announced that it will receive no state funding whatsoever. Only tionists, such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage, the Bilbao stands successful. world beyond their borders is a scary place; best lock the doors. When it comes to raising funds on a global scale, Tate’s efforts to But the arts are notoriously immune to this rhetoric. Museums tap wealthy, influential, connected private individuals, both in the UK and art are seen to be building bridges between countries, and on and internationally, have been key to the museum’s success. Earlier the whole, people are more accepting of exhibitions and artworks this year, Tate received a donation of £10m for the construction of crossing borders than they are of people crossing borders. The the Tate Modern Switch House extension from Eyal Ofer, an Israeli planned Louvre Abu Dhabi is one example of how this works. Abu national based in Monaco. Moreover, Tate has numerous internaDhabi wants Saadiyat Island (on which the Louvre is to be located) to tional committees, counting 425 decidedly international individuals, become a cultural holiday destination: it will be home to a projected spread across eight Acquisition Committees and an International eight separate museums alongside hotels and resorts. In exchange Council. Their role, like that of many such councils and boards at for its use of one of the world’s most prestigious art brands, the UAE museums, is not only to contribute financially, but also to open up will give France, and the Louvre, what it needs: money. The French avenues internationally for further funding in the future. government (which owns the Louvre) is profiting nicely out of the Similarly, Martin Roth, the soon-to-be ex-director of London’s deal, having sold the museum’s name for €400m over 30 years Victoria and Albert Museum, has long been a proponent of the inter(part of a €700m license fee), and in return having effectively ended nationalisation of museums and cross-border engagement, as well up with the biggest one-off increase to a museum’s endowment as being highly vocal about the rise of nationalism in Europe. Roth has strong and longstanding connections with the Middle East, in history. Unfortunately for the Louvre, for Europe and for the rest of particularly Qatar. Over the last couple of years, the museum has hosted two Qatarithe world, government fundsponsored shows, and the ing for national museums V&A and the Museum of is generally decreasing. But Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha for many major museums, as have exchanged loans on a for the Louvre, an alternative funding source lies in their regular basis since the Qatari brands: a ‘cultural capital’ that museum opened in 2008. Much like the arrangement appeals particularly to nations the Louvre has with the where equivalent cultural inEmiratis, the V&A would stitutions don’t already exist. have received significant And so another fulcrum has financial backing from the developed around the contenQataris (as Tate did for its tious balance between public Damien Hirst retrospective and private funding for the Levels of public and private funding at Tate, 2004–16. Source: Tate Financial Statements; in 2012). Such exhibitions arts: one that weighs national public funding is sourced from Grant-In-Aid figures, and private funding is defined as total other are expensive, often more against international fundvoluntary income, excluding donations of works of art. Courtesy Thomas Forwood than a single museum can ing. And raises a question: can a national museum be funded by international money and still bear, with global tours needed to avoid losses. be national? Perhaps soon to follow will be London’s National Gallery, Which leads in turn to another, more fundamental question: what which in its 2015 annual report states that it is ‘becoming more exactly is a national museum? Is it about the nation, for the nation? reliant on multi-year gifts from donors’. That year both the National Or does it just contain a ‘national collection’, the core of which likely Gallery and Tate received similar levels of state funding, but with came from some royal or private collection anyway? The definition is those figures representing 62 percent of annual revenue for the former not easy to pin down, but one thing does link all its incarnations, and and 15 percent for the latter, there’s no doubt that decreasing public this is a dependence on government funding – and by extension a full funding would affect the National Gallery far more. responsibility and accountability to the public. In terms of the last, in In the US, museums are getting bigger and bigger while strugBritain, for example, since 2001, state funding for Tate, the National gling to balance visitor experience, educational programmes, acquiGallery and the British Museum is conditional upon their granting sitions and personnel. From 2009 to 2015, total operating expenses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art increased 28 percent, reaching free public access to their collections. Most museums cannot, or will not, do what the Louvre has done. almost $368m and leaving a significant deficit in its books; earlier this For one thing, the Louvre Abu Dhabi project is, in many ways, just a year it announced staff cuts and restructuring, as well as delays to its pawn on the chessboard of international relations, and not museum multimillion-dollar-extension plans. strategy; for another, most museums either do not have a brand of Major American museums are far more reliant on private funds sufficient value or have one that is overvalued. The Guggenheim, the and commercial activity than public funds, with government largest setter of such precedents, and another partner for the Saadiyat funding, whether from local or federal sources, trending downwards Island project, has seen most of its projects, from Guadalajara to Las since 1989. In the 2014/15 fiscal year, the Met received $28m from the
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City of New York and $85,000 from the National Endowment for the museum’s donor base, but it contrasts with Tate, which, although Arts (NEA), just 7.6 percent of its total operating revenue. MoMA has founded on a large body of British art, is rapidly internationalising its collection. It is unknown where the balance of power lies in this not received any funding from the NEA since 2009. For both the Met and MoMA, the majority of their income comes internationalisation, whether it is Tate’s modus operandi in creating from commercial activity (tickets, restaurants, gift shops), but second a global collection, or whether it’s the influence of the many internato this is funding from various private individuals and corporations, tional acquisition committees. Either way, they are related. through grants, donations and, most of all, endowments. Put simply, But New York museums are not immune to an international if these museums are to increase revenue by means other than selling influx. Whereas MoMA’s board members are mostly American, more stuff in the gift shop, they need private money. MoMA PS1 is decidedly more international and younger. That board The striking aspect of benefactors to museums like the Met includes Adrian Cheng from China, Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi from Sharjah, Julia Stoschek from Germany and MoMA is that they are predomiWhat exactly is a national museum? and Svetlana Kuzmicheva-Uspenskaya nantly American. At MoMA, around 90 from Russia. The Met received a new percent of individuals and companies Is it about the nation, for the nation? substantial donation from Jade Lau giving more than $12,000 annually are Or does it just contain a ‘national (daughter of Hong Kong Chinese US-based, and further up the ladder, collection’, the core of which likely multibillionaire Joseph Lau, himself 90 out of 105 individuals donating $15,000 or more come from the US or an avid collector of art and jewelcame from some royal or private Canada, with the remainder made up lery), who is personally thanked in the collection anyway? of a half-dozen Europeans and some annual review for ‘bolstering the Met’s South Americans. For such seemingly international institutions, the acquisition funds’. Money arrived from the Middle East in the form of limited demographic of individuals who give to them is striking, the Art Jameel Fund, funded by Saudi Arabia’s Jameel family to help creating a rather ironic situation where these non-state-funded insti- ‘focus on the Met’s Middle Eastern initiatives’. tutions could be thought of as more genuinely national than some of The Jameel family has a long history of raising the profile of their European counterparts. The latest example of this almost-all- Islamic culture internationally, having donated heavily ($8m) to the national pool of donors is the recent donation of $100m to MoMA by V&A’s refurbishment of its Islamic Middle East gallery and to support David Geffen, a local lad, Brooklyn-born and -raised. the Jameel Prize, awarded jointly with the V&A, for contemporary art Perhaps another striking difference is that at MoMA, over 40 and design inspired by Islamic tradition. percent of works displayed are by American artists, considerably It is difficult to say which approach, international or local, is more than any other nationality. This is an amusing parallel to the best. There have been success stories in both camps. The Los Angeles
Rendering of Saadiyat Cultural District, on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, which will include the Zayed National Museum and branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. Courtesy SkyscraperCity
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artworld, far less internationally connected than New York, has now shown at the heart of its new building. Terms of the deal have not long had to do things its own way. Certainly in terms of the influx been made public in much detail. of public money, LACMA has received a much larger proportional In the same vein, the Louvre might come to relish or regret its partincome from public funds (23 percent in 2015) compared to New York nership with the UAE, especially if the UAE’s demands become more and more out of step with what the Louvre wants to do. Mainland counterparts. Eli and Edythe Broad are the backbone of the LA art scene. Since Europe is still suspicious of the relationship between private money the late 1970s, the Broads have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and culture, and countries remain accustomed to majority state keeping the city’s museums afloat, but often come into conflict with funding of their national museums. In parallel to the Louvre, the the museums themselves. Eli Broad resigned from MOCA’s board Centre Pompidou has seen its government funding (which makes in 1984 over disagreements about how the collection was being up around 60 percent of the museum’s total revenue) drop year on year from €75m in 2011 to €65m in run; was a trustee at the Hammer Most museums cannot do what the 2015. In response, it is looking to Asia, Museum when it controversially sold Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex Leicester; entering a three-year partnership with Louvre has done. For one thing, and supported Jeffrey Deitch as MOCA’s Adrian Cheng’s K11 Art Foundation the Louvre Abu Dhabi project is in director after giving the institution a and creating a new position for a K11 many ways just a pawn on the bailout of $30m – a regime that didn’t curator. Separately the Pompidou plans to open a temporary exhibition go smoothly at all. The Broads are chessboard of international relations, space in Seoul in 2017 as well as a fiveirrefutably LA’s biggest art benefacand not museum strategy tors, and perhaps more importantly, year space in China in 2018. they are local. As modern-day Medicis, they are surrounded by issues Further South, in Florence, Italy’s culture minister, Dario inherent to entrusting a city’s entire cultural sphere to one family’s Franceschini, announced a push for more private money to enter deep pockets; they are also the most obvious illustration of the fact Italy’s museum system. Eisa Bin Nasser, president of Dubai-based that nobody donates millions to an institution without wanting Alserkal Group, was there ready to listen to the museums’ proposals some say in how it conducts itself. Another case in point is the alleged for him to sponsor some restorations. demands made by Donald Fisher to SFMOMA in 2005, when he offered The artworld, and as we have seen, national museums, are emblemit the collection amassed by he and his wife, Doris, over 40 years. At the atic of the balance of national and international. Museums all across time, the museum’s board turned the offer down, citing a risk to its the public–independent spectrum have an international outlook. curatorial integrity were it to give the couple the control they wanted, They see the artworld as precisely that: global. It is open for business, but the Fischer collection has since made its way to SFMOMA and is and the network of international wealthy benefactors is growing. ar
The Broad, Los Angeles (installation view, third-floor galleries). Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy the Broad, Los Angeles, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York
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Biennial Burnout As the world lurches from one desperate crisis to the next, is it time to consider the real values of art? by Joshua Decter
We live in times of political degradation; every day, we mourn a society that is being vitiated by sullied politicians and corrupted systems. And yet we are society; these conditions are not outside of us, they are our own human frailties writ large. We want our biopower – ie, how we might use our human sovereignty and individual agency as a form of power vis-à-vis state power – to do good, we know that there are better and worse uses of power, and yet we also understand that power is itself a Pandora’s box that can be as compromising as it is emancipating. The question, as always, is how art and its systems figure into this state of affairs, and there are no easy answers, even though certain exhibition press releases – and their occasionally outlandish claims – would have us believe otherwise. There was a time when I believed that art (and as an atheist, I only believed in art) could provide a temporary respite from many of our problems, if only at the level of a kind of political imaginary: art as that which conjures alternative political realities through allegory, metaphor, representation, etc. And when I hungered for art to be a utilitarian problem solver, I found inspiration in certain examples of socially engaged art and ‘social practice’ art. And yet doubts linger, if only because we still need to think critically, dialectically, about the paradoxical intersections of art, the social, money, power, politics, the environment, etc. What happens when art, culture and the creative classes end up reproducing the inequitable conditions that art was supposed to challenge and transform? This is a dilemma for anyone concerned about social, economic, racial and other kinds of justice, and the civic responsibilities of art: how do we benefit the many, not only the few, and how do we make sure that we are solving more problems than we are creating? We need to be aware that the egalitarianism promised by some art – and its exhibitionary, market and discursive systems – may remain unfulfilled when that art (and its milieus) enters into and reproduces inegalitarian conditions. Do biennials – or for that matter any exhibition format – embody such contradictions? Are these sites of both freedom and unfreedom, unavoidably, because that’s also what it means to be human? While I admire the commitment of curators who organise these large-scale exhibitions, there’s nevertheless a little voice inside my head saying: our world is drowning in biennials, triennials and other periodic large-scale exhibition platforms. I visited a mere two this summer: the Berlin Biennale (The Present in Drag), and the São Paulo Biennial (Live Uncertainty). Yet I’ll miss the Gwangju Biennale (The
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Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?)), the Liverpool Biennial, the Shanghai Biennale (Why Not Ask Again?), the Busan Biennale (Hybridizing Earth, Discussing Multitude) and probably others that I’m not even aware exist. We may need a new biennial that simply creates more time for us… to see other biennials. Or perhaps we should just establish a new nation-state, Biennial, where everyone who organises biennials can live and work… and organise biennials. Over the decades, undoubtedly like others, I’ve developed a mild case of FOMB: Fear of Missing Biennials, and other big shows. Although in recent months this has been dwarfed by a more pernicious condition, FOATP: Fear of a Trump Presidency. But even if we miss a biennial here or a Manifesta there, we can always rely upon a continuous influx of emailed, tweeted and Facebooked press releases, up-to-the-minute ‘reports’ and instantaneous ‘reviews’, all so kindly reminding us about what we’re missing. Such inundation is exhausting for producers and receivers alike, and yet our exhibition culture industry keeps on growing, ironically, even as the so-called neoliberal ideology of unfettered economic growth comes under attack from some of the very same curators, artists, critics, theorists and others who generate these exhibition platforms. And when the critique of this exhibitionary logic is staged as the exhibition itself, or as a collateral element of the show, we’ve probably reached an era of postcontradiction (or did this happen decades ago?). The performance of critique/self-critique, of nonconformist oppositionality, has always been a central mechanism of avantgarde consciousness; these are now restaged as post-(neo)avantgarde tropes… on the exhibition stage. The Enlightenment model of the exhibition sits comfortably alongside the post-Enlightenment notion of the exhibition. And yet the performance (and I’m not necessarily alluding to neo-performance art…) of art’s contradictions can be instructive for publics: biennials and large-scale exhibition platforms are educational, and capital investment in biennials is at the same time an investment in the pedagogical utility of art. One need only consider what may be the most successful – and perhaps least discussed – aspect of the São Paulo Biennial as an institution: a commitment to bringing in thousands of children for educational tours of the shows (and the hiring/training of educators for this purpose), thereby supplementing their general education. Such commitments to education within the context of large-scale exhibitions are an extension of Enlightenment ideas about the illuminating capacity of art and culture, even as certain artworks and exhibition
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Charlotte Johannesson, Attack Attitude, 1977 (installation view, São Paulo Biennial, 2016), tapestry, 200 × 100 cm. Courtesy Malmö Konstmuseum
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themes may interrogate the less savoury aspects of Enlightenment and economic ecosystems, and if crisis requires us to make difficult choices – or to temporarily rearrange priorities – to help people thinking and history. And yet I’ve always found it a bit odd to criticise unfettered hyper- whose very lives may be at stake. To consider recent political events capitalist growth (which I’m not defending by any means) and not in Brazil: one of interim president Michel Temer’s first ill-considsee the proliferation of biennials and other exhibition platforms ered decisions was to fold the Ministry of Culture into the Ministry as participating at least to a certain extent in that model of growth; of Education, which only exacerbated anxiety in the art and cultural the increase of private / corporate / foundation funding for biennials communities about their future following what some have called a where public / governmental funding is inadequate is evidence of ‘legal coup’ that enabled the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. Bowing this perhaps unavoidable situation. It has been argued that biennials to protests, Temer relented and reinstated the Ministry of Culture as and other exhibition events are attractors of capital for places lacking a standalone ministry in May 2016. Of course, many Brazilians don’t capital: the biennial as a kind of venture capital event to regrow local, accept him as a legitimate president, so the question of the Ministry of regional and global economies. So regardless of the ideology or poli- Culture is just one of many challenges facing the country… a country tics or theme of this or that biennial, there’s really no escaping the fact to which I feel deeply connected. Temer has proposed a 20-year freeze that biennials can really only happen today with massive inflows of on public spending (in real terms) for education and health, unbecapital from either private, corporate or public sources. The product of lievably enough. This would be a cruel form of austerity for a country biennials is also more biennials. Biennials reproduce biennials, and so wherein millions of people who managed to work their way out of there is an economic logic there. But the lingering question at moments poverty into something resembling the middle class are already backof deep economic crisis and uncertainty is: just how much invest- sliding into unemployment and financial precariousness. It goes ment in art culture should there be, if people lack basic services? How without saying that there needs to be funding and infrastructure for art and culture, and yet when do we calibrate these tradea country is in the midst of a offs, on the micro, macro and profound economic recession, every other nuanced human level? And when the theme with staggering levels of unemof an art exhibition calls for ployment and a dysfunctional us to imagine a postcapitalist political system, where does art economy, and alternative soand culture fit into any process of rebuilding the economy and cial, racial, gender, political and the crucial social systems that human relations, for instance, provide a public safety net for it’s not entirely clear how that millions of people struggling exhibition would bring about such change to our operating due to the economic crisis? This systems, other than pointing is the dilemma regarding levels to future possibilities… for fuof public spending on art and culture, and it is exacerbated ture generations. by the fact that we don’t want As someone who travels frequently between the United States and Brazil, there appears to the private sector to take over the public sector’s – government’s – be no escape from our desultory state of political affairs in 2016, as responsibility to support art. Governmental support for art sends a both nations appear paralysed by various forms of ideological polar- powerful political message. It would be unproductive – if not politiisation, deep economic inequities, systemic corruption, educational cally dangerous – under certain circumstances to suggest that art and crises, a withering public sector, the nefarious influence of religion culture don’t play a role in economic and social development, thereby in secular politics, the uncertainty of the middle classes, rightwing giving ammunition to those who wish to defund the arts for purely demagoguery, leftwing ineffectuality, electoral shenanigans, etc. But ideological reasons. However, anywhere there are deep economic given the sheer depth of the economic crisis in Brazil, I was thinking inequities, it is appropriate to ask how the economies of art help the this summer – when there was so much debate about the value of the greatest number of people, not only the privileged few. Based upon Rio Olympics – that in cities where basic public infrastructure for numerous studies conducted in the US, it is clear that art is an imporhospitals and other social services is critically lacking due to financial tant component of early education for children (I’m a product of such crises and corruption, perhaps public funding for art should not be a an education), and so we need governmental policies that increase priority. In other words, as an arts professional deeply committed to arts education in schools, and public funding for it (as well as smart art, I would nevertheless have no problem with art – and its institu- public/private-sector partnerships) as a necessary societal infrastructions – taking a backseat, a pause, until essential human services are ture. The question however is whether centralised, large-scale exhirestored to a city. Now, realistically speaking, art never pauses, because bitions in major urban centres are always the best delivery systems in artists are always making art, curators are always making shows and times of crisis, or whether cultural capital needs to be decentralised art may indeed be an essential human ‘service’. And although there and redistributed. This is a fraught political issue that certain exhishould be no debate about whether art is crucial bitions have endeavoured to address by inviting Felipe Mujica, The Unknown Universities, 2016 to society (art is society), it is still necessary to socially engaged and social-practice artists to (installation view, São Paulo Biennial, 2016), think carefully about how art’s ecosystems develop collaborative and participatory works fabric, thread and embroidered yarn, 30 panels, function in relation to other cultural, political with communities beyond the institutional 295 × 160 cm. Photo: the author
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frame, even though we also understand that the institutional frame contrary, is capital for art and other creative endeavours in fact key operates beyond a museum or pavilion’s literal walls. The artist is also to preserving human survival? And, for example, when defence and military budgets in many nations dwarf budgets for art and culture, always an emissary of the institution of art, in any context. Every biennial, every exhibition, advertises some notion of art are such questions ludicrous, particularly in relation to political politics, of art postpolitics, the utility of art, of accelerated art politics, regimes that place art and culture on the budgetary chopping block of decelerated art politics, of nonart politics, of postart nonpolitics as part of austerity programmes? And let’s not forget, ISIS destroys art and so on; we are buried under an avalanche of claims. Every biennial, and artefacts (leading the Hague to define the destruction of cultural every exhibition, understands itself to be a public sphere, a commons, heritage as a war crime), yet ISIS also preserves some artefacts to sell a fluid discursive platform, a contextually responsive organism, on the black markets. Weirdly ironic. a temporary autonomous zone, a disrupter, etc. These exhibitions If artists, curators and writers claim that certain art practices, wish to operate at various speeds and temporalities simultaneously: and certain arrangements of these practices within biennials and slow and fast, past, present and future. But a pause in biennials and other exhibition platforms, promote progressive economic, social other periodic exhibitions would seem an impossibility: our exhi- and other notions of human justice that are not only performed / bition-industrial complex feeds – and is in turn fed by – museums, represented but also transmitted to publics in ways that eventually galleries, alternative spaces, curatorial programmes (and other parts make their way into concrete policies, how do we trace these processes of academia), global private capital, local / national public capital and in a verifiable way without predicating art on metrics and outcomes just about everything else. The world might come to a standstill if our whose results politicians could use against art (‘Either the biennial exhibition systems broke down. transforms society in some verifiable way or no more funding for your We’re the disease and the cure, the problem and the solution, biennial!’)? While we must be wary of attempts by conservative forces the critique and the postto defund art and culture, we critique, and a thousand bienmust also be wary of attempts to stifle debate within art and nials may not cure us. This is perhaps what DIS – the curatoculture about the societal and rial collective responsible for human benefits of art and culture; open debate is what art this past summer’s Berlin Biennale 9 – may have been rather demands from us. Can biennials cheekily suggesting: if everyand other large-scale art events function as drivers of progress thing is in drag, then how can we on the redirecting of capital to know anything with any dewhere it is most needed? For gree of certainty? When emerging conditions of identity, places in the world in the midst gender, politics, anti-politics, of economic crisis and shortart or fashion become new norfalls in public financing, should matives so quickly and fluidly? public support of art be tempoSome have accused DIS of rarily deprioritised, in relation offering a self-entitled vision of art and the world that lacks sensi- to other more pressing infrastructural needs, such as housing, health tivity to current problems of economic and racial justice, or the and education, even as some argue that art can function as an incurefugee crisis, for instance, and perhaps the exhibition was emblem- bator of new ideas regarding affordable housing, economic and atic of a kind of return to a repressed neopostmodernist postpolitical racial justice, accessible healthcare, among other basic social needs politics that some disillusioned millennials may find to be seductive. and challenges? But what is a politically responsible exhibition? And if a biennial is Is it because all politics and ideologies – and the media – seem to both the symptom and the critique of the symptom, is there an exit have failed us, that the desire for art to enable progressive transformafrom this feedback loop? BB9 may have embodied, for better and / or tion of the world has intensified? Have we converted our distrust of worse, the argument that distinctions between art, subcultures and politics into a trust of art? And so has art been reinstrumentalised as a fashion / design / lifestyle/experience / popular cultures are acceler- form of politics? Should we trust art and its institutions more than the ating into oblivion, and that the politics of biennials may be super- institution of politics, even as we are anxious about talking candidly seding the ability of biennials to be political… even though partici- about politics and the power of the artworlds? We want biennials pants such as Trevor Paglen, Adrian Piper or Hito Steyerl (an artist and other exhibitions to be transformative experiences for publics, also present at the São Paulo Biennial) might disagree. but it’s not always clear if they are, or how they are. Shouldn’t we also We know that the biennial and exhibition system must be talk about the ethical and political infrastructure of our exhibition sustained by large amounts of capital (to reproduce itself as cultural platforms – how ethics and politics are enacted in these contexts – capital, which is transformed back into capital, etc), and yet are these and not only about how ethics and politics appear to be represented public, private and public–private expenditures always the best (ie, exhibited), via artworks, to publics? In other words, so as to make use of our capital when humanitarian crises proliferate around the progressive change in the world, perhaps we should start at home globe? Are there times of emergency when art/ with ourselves and our systems of art. Or to put Cecile B. Evans, What the Heart Wants, 2016 creative capital (so to speak) should be diverted it another way still: be the biennial you want to (installation view, 9th Berlin Biennale). to capital to enable human survival? Or, to the see in the world. ar Photo: the author
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9-13NOV.2016
Hu Xiangqian Gold Rush In Huge Wave, 2016
Aike-Dellarco Arario Gallery BANK Beijing Art Now Gallery Ben Brown Fine Arts Boers-Li Gallery Canton Gallery Sadie Coles HQ 萨迪科尔斯 HQ Pilar Corrias Massimo De Carlo Gladstone Gallery Hauser & Wirth INK Studio Pearl Lam Galleries Long March Space Edouard Malingue Gallery Galerie Urs Meile Ota Fine Arts Pace Gallery Galerie Perrotin Platform China Esther Schipper Gallery Shanghai Gallery of Art ShanghART Gallery Timothy Taylor TKG+ Verne & Vernon White Cube White Space Beijing Leo Xu Projects David Zwirner
The Year in Review
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t 159
October 05.10 The World Bank estimates that 9.6 percent of the world’s population is living in extreme poverty this year, down from 12.8 percent in 2012
08.10 Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, which will host exhibitions drawn from the artist’s collection, opens in Vauxhall, London
05.10 After prolonged strike action, staff at London’s National Gallery return to work. Since February, the workers have staged multiple protests against the museum’s plan to privatise some of its visitor and security services, before entering an indefinite strike on 11 August
10.10 Two explosions kill nearly 100 people during a peace rally in Ankara
15.10 The German automotive watchdog KBA orders Volkswagen to recall 2.4 million diesel vehicles fitted with software that will cheat emissions tests
13.10 The first Hyundai commission in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, by Abraham Cruzvillegas, opens, marking the beginning of an 11-year sponsorship deal that replaces the Unilever Series (2000–12)
26.10 A magnitude 7.5 earthquake strikes the Hindu Kush region and causes 398 deaths across Pakistan, Afghanistan and India
29.10 China ends its onechild policy after 35 years, hoping to offset the country’s ageing workforce 30.10 Opening of the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut (backed by Tony Salamé, founder and CEO of Aïshti, an empire of department stores, spas, high-end shops, restaurants, a few magazines and more), a curious hybrid of art and fashion, with about 12,000sqm of exhibition space flanking an enormous new shopping mall. The inaugural group show, New Skin, is curated by Massimiliano Gioni
30.10 Julia Peyton-Jones announces she will step down as codirector of London’s Serpentine Galleries after 25 years with the institution 09.11 Five people associated with Hong Kong publisher Might Current and Causeway Bay Books, known for books critical of the Chinese regime, are reported missing. They resurface in mainland China in January and February, confessing to various crimes. Some Hong Kong sellers begin taking books critical of China off their shelves
07.11 A meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou – the first between the countries’ leaders in 66 years – is seen as another step towards thawing relations
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November
13.11 A series of coordinated attacks by gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris kill 130 and injure 386, with ISIS claiming responsibility
13.11 Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, wins an absolute majority in parliament, marking Myanmar’s first democratically elected government since the 1962 Burmese coup d’état. In March 2016 she becomes Myanmar’s first female foreign minister
15.11 The Jakarta Biennale, cocurated by Charles Esche, opens under the title Mayu Kena, Mundur Kena (Neither Forward nor Back)
10.11 Barbara Gladstone opens Gladstone 64, a project space (and the gallery’s third exhibition space in Manhattan), with a show of large-scale drawings by Pierre Klossowski
17.11 The South Korean art community petitions against the appointment of former MACBA director Bartomeu Marí to the MMCA Seoul directorship after a censorship scandal ended his tenure in Barcelona
24.11 National Gallery Singapore opens in the renovated former Supreme Court Building and City Hall. It oversees the largest public display of modern Southeast Asian art and marks the city-state’s bid to become the regional centre for visual arts
25.11 Leading figures from the arts rally around artist and poet Ashraf Fayadh, sentenced to death by a Saudi court for renouncing Islam, a charge he denies. In February his sentence is commuted to eight years in prison and 800 lashes
27.11 Scientific studies confirm more than 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are retreating. Thawing glaciers account for about 20 percent of the sea-level rise recorded in the past century
30.11 World leaders gather in Paris for COP21, the UN conference on climate change. The result is the Paris Agreement, a global pact adopted by 195 countries engaging all signatories to reduce carbon emissions
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December 01.12 A two-year legal dispute between Danh Vo, Berlin’s Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie and Dutch collector Bert Kreuk is finally resolved. The case centres on Kreuk’s claim that the artist promised a large new work for a show the collector was curating that would then be aquired by Kreuk at an institutional discount. Vo loans a cardboard whiskey box; Kreuk siezes the artwork and sues for a bigger piece. In June a Rotterdam district court rules that Vo produce a ‘large and impressive’ work for Kreuk, valued at $350,000. Vo proposes a wall text: SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS, YOU FAGGOT. The eventual settlement sees no exchange of artworks or money
05.12 Visitor stabbed at Art Basel Miami Beach; some witnesses mistake it for a work of performance art
07.12 Multidisciplinary collective Assemble wins 2015 Turner Prize
13.12 For the first time, women in Saudi Arabia are allowed to vote and run for office. More than a dozen women win seats on local councils throughout the country. However, the new female elected officials make up less than 1 percent of all council members and have limited power
07.12 Beijing’s city government issues its first red-alert for pollution, ordering schools to close, halting outdoor construction and restricting car use due to hazardous air quality
27.12 Ellsworth Kelly dies aged ninety-two
29.12 A report issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists announces that 69 journalists have been killed while on the job in 2015. Syria is where the greatest number have died
05.01 Lars Nittve steps down as director of M+, Hong Kong, after five years in the role. The director of collections at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Suhanya Raffel, will take over in November
07.01 The Chinese stock market falls more than 7 percent, spilling over to global markets; the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops nearly 400 points in one day
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10.01 David Bowie, the international rock star, pop-culture icon, artist and actor, born in 1947, dies. His collection of modern and contemporary art and design will go on sale at Sotheby’s London on 10–11 November
12.01 Ten people die and 15 are injured following a terrorist explosion in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square
06.01 For Freedoms, the first artist-run (and nonpartisan) ‘Super PAC’, is founded by photographer Hank Willis Thomas and conceptual artist Eric Gottesman. Their foundational statement reads: ‘We believe that artists, and art, play an important role in galvanizing our society to do better. We are frustrated with a system in which money, divisiveness, and a general lack of truth-telling have stifled complex conversation. We created the first artist-run super Pac because we believe it’s time for artists to become more involved in the political process… For Freedoms encourages new forms of critical discourse surrounding the upcoming 2016 presidential election. Our medium for this project is American democracy, and our mission is to support the effort to reshape it into a more transparent and representative form.’ On 8 July, artist Dread Scott hangs a flag reading ‘a man was lynched by police yesterday’ (referencing a civil rightsera slogan, with an added ‘by the police’, and created after Walter L. Scott was killed in North Charleston, South Carolina, in April 2015) outside the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York as part of a For Freedoms benefit. A week earlier 12 policemen had been shot in Dallas. The artist and gallery receive telephone threats and pressure to remove the work as a result. The police put the gallery under special alert
January 11.01 Sotheby’s acquires Art Agency, Partners consultancy (Amy Cappellazzo, Allan Schwartzman and Adam Chin). They head up a new fine-art division with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, with the aim of increasing profits, building private sales and expanding its client base
16.01 The International Atomic Energy Agency announces that Iran has adequately dismantled its nuclear weapons programme, allowing the United Nations to lift sanctions immediately
19.01 Pakistan lifts a three-year ban on YouTube after Google launches a local version that allows the government to demand removal of material it considers to be offensive. Similar systems have existed in China for many years. Also on this day, the price of oil drops below $28 a barrel, the lowest since 2003
16.01 Democratic Progressive Party chairwoman and nominee Tsai Ing-wen wins Taiwan’s presidential elections, defeating the party of current president Ma Yingjeou. The DPP is perceived by mainland China to be more actively in pursuit of a separate Taiwanese identity, although Tsai has repeatedly promised she will maintain the ‘status quo’ in cross-Straits relations
23.01 Christine Macel is named artistic director of the 2017 Venice Biennale
26.01 Istanbul’s nonprofit SALT Beyoğlu closes, ostensibly because building renovations had been carried out without the appropriate permits; rumours circulate that this is as a result of government pressure following some ‘provocative’ exhibitions
31.01 A photograph showing Ai Weiwei lying facedown on a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos, posing as the drowned Turkish-Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, creates controversy on social media and in the press
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February 01.02 The World Health Organization declares the spread of Zika virus an international public health emergency
03.02 Fernando Cocchiarale is appointed curator of MAM Rio; the 2016 Melbourne Art Fair is cancelled after the withdrawal of major galleries
06.02 A 6.4 magnitude earthquake strikes southern Taiwan, leaving 14 people dead and 484 injured
07.02 North Korea launches a long-range rocket into space, violating multiple UN treaties and prompting condemnation from around the world
09.02 Clashes break out and turn into a riot in the Mong Kok district of Hong Kong after the police try to close down illegal food vendors. Nearly 90 police officers are injured
05–08.02 300 artists, curators and writers from South Asia and beyond take part in the 2016 Dhaka Art Summit, a combination of biennial, symposium, festival and conference organised by the Samdani Art Foundation in the Bangladeshi capital
February The fourth edition of Paris Photo Los Angeles, the third edition of FIAC’s satellite fair Officielle and the launch of FIAC LA are all cancelled. A few months later, in July 2016, Reed Exhibitions France, the organisers of the three fairs, announces the expansion of FIAC into the Petit Palais
15.02 A new ruling in China bars foreign media from publishing on Chinese-controlled Internet
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22.02 Vietnamese nonprofit Sàn Art, under government pressure, decides to discontinue its residency programme
19.02 Umberto Eco, the Italian writer and philosopher, dies at the age of eighty-four
20.02 Italian refugee documentary Fire at Sea, directed by Gianfranco Rosi, wins the 66th Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear award for best film
24.02 Sprüth Magers opens a 4,200sqm midcentury space, directly across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with a solo show by John Baldessari
March
11.03 BP announces the end of its 26-year sponsorship of Tate 29.02 Anish Kapoor secures exclusive rights in the field of art over Vantablack, ‘world’s darkest material’
15.03 Rashid Rana is announced as the director of the first edition of the Lahore Biennale (2017)
13.03 Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, the gallery’s latest outpost, directed by former MOCA curator Paul Schimmel, opens in downtown Los Angeles with Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016
18.03 The 20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, opens
19.03 Tracey Emin marries a stone in romantic South of France ceremony
22.03 Three coordinated bombings in Brussels kill 35 and injure more than 300. ISIS claims responsibility for the attacks
18.03 The Met Breuer, the new home for the Met’s modern and contemporary department, opens in the Whitney Museum’s former venue on New York’s Madison Avenue with a show by the Indian modernist artist Nasreen Mohamedi
26.03 British newspaper The Independent publishes its last print edition
27.03 A suicide bomber from a Pakistani Taliban faction kills at least 60 people and injures 300 others at a park in Lahore, targeting Christians celebrating Easter Sunday
31.03 Elisabeth Murdoch creates a £100,000 prize for UK-based midcareer women artists 31.03 Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-British architect, dies in Miami aged sixty-five
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April
06.04 Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery suffers a partial building collapse; this after being shut down by authorities five months earlier
03.04 A trove of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca is leaked, detailing the workings of more than 200,000 offshore companies, some for illegal purposes, including fraud and tax evasion. Many transactions are legal, if secretive. Prominent art-market figures are among those whose dealings are revealed
06.04 Banned from the presidency, Aung San Soo Kyi is officially established as the first state counsellor (de facto prime minister) of Burma by President Htin Kyaw
09.04 Pioneering filmmaker and artist Tony Conrad, born 1940, dies
11.04 Oscar Murillo is deported from Australia after destroying his passport on the inbound flight. The artist claims he wanted to create ‘an entropy, a special situation, a traumatism’
13.04 Elmgreen & Dragset are named curators of the Istanbul Biennial; Yana Peel is named CEO of London’s Serpentine Galleries, and Hans Ulrich Obrist shifts from co-director to artistic director; the US bans imports of Syrian art in fight against ISIS’s trafficking and looting of the country’s heritage
14.04 Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum, the first museum dedicated to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, announces its closure. Organisers say they believe they are being targeted for political reasons
17.04 The Guggenheim faces more protests as officials sever negotiations with Gulf Labor coalition regarding the rights of workers involved in the construction of the museum’s latest branch, in Abu Dhabi
14.04 Hollywood sports and entertainment agency WME-IMG buys a major stake in Frieze Art Fair. Cofounder Ari Emmanuel, commenting on the deal, observes: ‘When you think about our network across media, events, digital and brand partnerships and their expertise in the artworld, this partnership is a force multiplier for our respective businesses’
15.04 Influential Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, born 1935, dies
22.04 LA dealer Perry Rubenstein is arrested on grand theft charges filed on behalf of art collectors Michael Ovitz and Michael Salke; he denies the allegations
21.04 Prince, music legend, dies aged fifty-seven 21.04 The Met announces job cuts in New York in response to a $10m deficit
23.04 Beyoncé releases Lemonade. This ‘visual album’ comes with a one-hour film detailing the songs it contains, and debuts at number one on the charts
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May
28.04 Galerie Perrotin opens a new space in Seoul, its third outside Paris
29.04 MoMA announces that it is looking to cut staff via voluntary redundancy, shortly after receiving a $100m gift from David Geffen
26.04 Wolfgang Tillmans publishes his pro-EU campaign posters ahead of the UK’s Brexit referendum; the tide is not turned
04.05 Art worth $35m is destroyed following a fire at the home of artist Rosemarie Trockel in Cologne
03.05 Lisson Gallery opens a new outpost in New York with a show by Carmen Herrera. This is the gallery’s third space, joining two existing spaces, in London and Milan
12.05 Online auction houses Auctionata and Paddle8 announce plans to merge
14.05 SFMOMA reopens after a threeyear expansion project that brings its total floorspace to 42,700sqm. The museum’s new wing is host to 260 of 600 artworks promised in a controversial 100-year loan from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, and about 3,000 new acquisitions, from multiple donors, are added to the museum’s collection
19.05 The Indianapolis Museum of Art, hobbled by debt-service payments, announces plans to pay off more than $17m in loans by the end of 2016
19.05 Oppenheimer Blue, a large and rare blue diamond, is sold for US $57.6m, the most expensive jewel ever sold at an auction
22.05 I, Daniel Blake, directed by Ken Loach, wins the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival
27.05 Law-and-order candidate Rodrigo Duterte is elected president of the Philippines, followed by a spike in vigilante killings. ‘Hitler massacred three million Jews,’ he says in September (getting the number wrong). ‘There’s three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them’
28.05 The 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture, titled Reporting from the Front and directed by Pritzker Prizewinning Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, opens
November 2016
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04.06 The 9th Berlin Biennale: The Present in Drag, curated by collective DIS, opens across various venues in its host city; Museum MACAN, Indonesia’s first international modern art space, unveils the design for a building to open in Jakarta in 2017
June 03.06 Music photographer Dennis Morris becomes the third person to sue artist Richard Prince for copyright infringement since 2013; the first of the cases was settled in Prince’s favour
09.06 Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art receives a $100,000 matching grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts to support programming in the late artist’s Mobile Homestead (2006–13), a lifesize replica of his childhood home
06.06 Artists’ Union England (AUE), the country’s first trade union for artists, is launched
09.06 Korean gallerist Hyeon is indicted for forging and selling three paintings by Lee Ufan, a crime to which the dealer later confesses. On 5 July, Ufan authenticates these and 11 other suspected forgeries, saying, ‘I concluded that there is not anything strange with a single piece’
11.06 Manifesta 11: What People Do for Money, curated by Christian Jankowski, opens in various venues across Zürich 12.06 A gunman kills 49 people and injures 53 in a terrorist attack/ hate crime inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. It is the deadliest mass shooting by a single killer in US history
12.06 ‘Thinking at the Edge of the World’, a three-day cross-disciplinary conference organised by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and the Northern Norway Art Museum, considers changes in the Arctic as a flashpoint for things to come farther south
17.06 The Switch House, Tate Modern’s new extension, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, opens
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17.06 Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each amass enough delegates to become, respectively, the Republican and Democratic nominees for president
20.06 Some staff members at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre write an open letter to the mayor of Berlin protesting former Tate Modern director Chris Dercon’s appointment as director. Their concerns range from a loss of cultural identity, a selling out of tradition and a threat to diversity. In July a group of international curators including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Okwui Enwezor, Adam Szymczyk and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, as well as architect Rem Koolhaas and artist Philippe Parreno, reply in Dercon’s defence, concluding: ‘If the city [of Berlin] accedes to a narrow-minded and self-interested coup d’etat, it will have succumbed to cheap innuendo and failed to defend the professional basis upon which Mr. Dercon was appointed’
17.06 David Zwirner announces plans to open a 10,000sqm exhibition space in Hong Kong on the fifth and sixth floors of the H Queen lifestyle development in 2017
18.06 Christo’s The Floating Piers, a three-kilometre-long floating walkway connecting Monte Isola and Isola di San Paolo on Northern Italy’s Lago d’Iseo to the mainland, attracts over 1.2 million visitors during its 16-day run
23.06 In a referendum on the UK’s European membership, 51.9 percent of British voters choose to leave the EU
July
28.06 A terrorist attack at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport leaves 45 killed and over 230 injured 24.06 President Obama designates New York’s Stonewall Inn, site of riots in 1969 that sparked a national gay rights movement, as the US’s first LGBT national monument
30.06 Guy Ullens announces his intention to sell his eponymous Beijing museum, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), and, separately, his art collection
01.07 Austria’s constitutional court annuls the results of the presidential election held in May, after an investigation – requested by the far-right Freedom party, who landed second in the race – reveals irregularities in the vote count. The new election, scheduled for 2 October, is also postponed due to the faulty glue of the ballot envelopes, exacerbating political uncertainty in the country, which has been without a president since 8 July. The new election date is set for 4 December
07.07 The augmented-reality game Pokémon Go launches in Australia, New Zealand and the US, before arriving in Europe and Southeast Asia
04.07 Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai’s first institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art, opens in Thailand
12.07 The Philippines wins the arbitration case it had filed at the Permanent Court of Arbitration regarding the legality of China’s ‘nine-dotted line’ claim over the South China Sea under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
15.07 Led by the Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement, residents of the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles argue that art galleries and the gentrification that comes with them should leave the ’hood in order to limit the cost of housing
08.07 London dealer Timothy Taylor announces plans to open a New York gallery; despite warnings from artists, dealers, collectors and museum directors, the Cultural Property Protection Law passes the upper house of the German parliament. The law requires the export of any cultural objects older than 75 years and worth $300,000 or more to be licensed. In September, painter Georg Baselitz withdraws works he has lent to German museums in protest
09.07 The 9th Liverpool Biennial opens
15.07 A faction of the Turkish Armed Forces attempts a coup against state institutions. It fails. 300 people are killed and more than 2,100 injured. In the aftermath 40,000 people are arrested and 100,000 purged from positions of power
27.07 French artist Orlan loses plagiarism suit against Lady Gaga
17.07 Alan Vega, artist and formerly lead singer of Suicide, dies at age seventy-eight
27.07 A truck is driven into a mass of revellers during Bastille Day celebrations on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 84 and injuring hundreds
November 2016
27.07 Agnes Husslein-Arco, director of Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, becomes the latest of Austria’s museum directors to be dismissed over expense-account violations
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August
01.08 Sotheby’s announces that Chen Dongsheng, founder of Chinese auction house China Guardian, has become its largest shareholder
04.08 The Met, in New York, announces record attendance figures despite its financial problems
02.08 New York dealer Mary Boone sues art adviser Vanessa Buia’s company over the resale of works by KAWS in Paris
03.08 Turkish biennale Sinopale announces its postponement following the country’s recent political turmoil
05.08 The 2016 Summer Olympics kick off in Rio de Janeiro
03.08 A paper published by IBM scientists in Zürich reveals the creation of an artificial neuron – a potential first step in creating an artificial brain
09.08 Indian activist Irom Sharmila ends her 16-year hunger strike in order to compete in local elections. Sharmila started what has become the world’s longest hunger strike in 2000 in protest against a massacre perpetrated by the state on civilians, and was subsequently arrested, released and rearrested repeatedly under the charge of attempted suicide (she was force-fed during her detentions)
23.08 Having been forced to testify in court that he was not ‘Pete Doige’, had never been in the custody of the Thunder Bay Correctional Center and did not paint a work that a former prison officer and a current Chicago gallery were saying he had, painter Peter Doig successfully defends the integrity of his oeuvre
31.08 Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is impeached and removed from office for breaking budgetary law
08.09 Nicholas Serota announces he will be leaving his role as director of Tate after 28 years in charge
31.08 Thieves steal millions of dollars in materials from Anselm kiefer’s Paris studio 31.08 ISIS announces the death of its chief propagandist and strategist, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, killed in a US drone strike
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September
24.08 A 6.2 magnitude earthquake strikes Italy, killing nearly 300 people and destroying the historic town of Amatrice
24.08 Turkey enters the Syrian civil war by sending in tanks, warplanes and other military forces to push ISIS out of Jarabulus, a Syrian city on the border between the two countries
24.08 Colombia and the leftist rebel group FARC make a peace deal to end a 52-year conflict. Colombian residents narrowly – and shockingly – reject the deal in a referendum held in October
01.09 SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016 opens
02.09 The 11th Gwangju Biennale, titled The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?) and curated by Maria Lind, also opens
03.09 As does Busan Biennale: Hybridizing Earth, Discussing Multitude, curated by Yun Cheagab
03.09 The US and China, together responsible for 40 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, ratify the Paris Agreement
04.09 Hong Kong holds its legislative elections, and has the highest turnout of voters in the territory’s history. To the surprise of China’s leadership, candidates from the antiBeijing ‘localists’ protest movement win seats for the first time, reflecting growing calls in Hong Kong for increased autonomy
04.09 V&A director Martin Roth steps down after five years in the role; the first phase of the inaugural Shanghai Project, a cross-disciplinary event directed by Lee Yongwoo and Hans Ulrich Obrist, opens
05.09 The 2016 edition of the Çanakkale Biennial is also cancelled in the wake Turkey’s failed military coup
09.09 The government of North Korea conducts its fifth and reportedly biggest nuclear test. World leaders condemn the act, with South Korea calling it ‘maniacal recklessness’
06.09 The Syrian government is suspected of dropping chlorine bombs on a besieged neighbourhood in Aleppo. More than 100 are hospitalised for oxygen treatment
09.09 Finland rejects plans for state funding for the projected Guggenheim Museum Helsinki
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September
09.09 Inaugural Yinchuan Biennale in northwest China, curated by Bose Krishnamachari, opens not without controversy after the censorship of work by Ai Weiwei
09.09 Art Basel announces the first collaboration of its Art Basel Cities initiative: Buenos Aires. The scheme seeks to enhance local art scenes and connect them to the international artworld
09.09 US Secretary of State John Kerry announces US and Russian plans for a Syrian ceasefire, focusing on a restriction of air force combat missions, the greatest cause of civilian deaths. It disintegrates in less than two weeks when Russian and Syrian forces bomb Aleppo in what are called the war’s fiercest assaults yet
10.09 The 10th Taipei Biennial, curated by Corinne Diserens, opens under the title Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, curated by Jochen Volz, opens
12.09 The NCAA announces that it will be relocating all championship tournament games out of North Carolina in response to the state’s controversial passing of the ‘Bathroom Bill’ law that requires people to use public restrooms according to their sex at birth and not the sex they identify with. This follows on the heels of a similar announcement by the NBA, as well as other major sports organisations, entertainers and companies who have pulled events or jobs from the state in protest
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13.09 Actor Alec Baldwin sues dealer Mary Boone for fraud over his purchase of a painting by Ross Bleckner that he believed to be Sea and Mirror (1996), but which instead was another painting with the same title dated 1996–2010; Boone denies the charges
12.09 MCH Group, the parent company of Art Basel, announces that it has bought a majority stake in the India Art Fair
13.09 The organisers of London’s Art 16 fair announce that the next edition will not take place
15.09 MoMA announces the online release of an archive of more than 30,000 images documenting exhibitions at the institution since its opening in 1929
ArtReview
24.09 President Obama inaugurates the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC
October
22.09 Artist Ulay wins a court case against former partner Marina Abramović, who is subsequently ordered to pay Ulay $278,000 in compensation for the sales of their joint works. Abramović later removes controversial comments about Aboriginal Australians from a diary entry dating from 1979 in her forthcoming memoir
22.09 The title of the 2017 Venice Biennale is announced: Vive arte viva
26.09 The first presidential debate takes place between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton 28.09 India bans Pakistani actors from Bollywood productions over killings in the Kashmir region, where tensions between Pakistan and India have been escalating. In response, Pakistani cinemas stop screening Indian films
27.09 Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi is sentenced to nine years in jail after becoming the first person to be convicted at the International Criminal Court following a trial that treats the destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime. He was convicted of destroying shrines in Timbuktu, Mali
04.10 Paris-based gallerist Kamel Mennour inaugurates a new space in London with a Latifa Echakhch show. On the same day, French dealer Almine Rech inaugurates a new ground-floor showroom at Grosvenor Hill in Mayfair, opposite Gagosian Gallery, with a Jeff Koons show; Philippe Parreno’s Hyundai commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commission is unveiled
19.10 La Biennale de Montréal: Le Grand Balcon, curated by Philippe Pirotte, opens
01.10 Skarstedt opens its second London space – 370sqm in St James’s – with a display of History Portraits by Cindy Sherman and Tapestry Paintings by David Salle
November 2016
27.10 Almine Rech adds a 280sqm gallery in New York to her new London space and longtime Brussels and Paris galleries
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Image Credits
pp 160–61 (Colour) Portrait of Abraham Cruzvillegas in front of the 2015 Hyundai Commission: Empty Lot, photo: Joe Humphrys, © the artist and Tate Photography; Aïshti Foundation exterior view, photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli; Julia Peyton-Jones, photo: Greg Funnell; Gladstone 64, New York, photo: David Regen, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Former Supreme Court, Rotunda Dome, Singapore, courtesy National Gallery Singapore. (B/W) PCS members strike at the National Gallery, London, 10 July 2014, photo: Judy Beishon; Mourning after the 2015 Ankara bombings: flowers in front of the Central railway station, photo: Yildiz Yazicioglu, courtesy VOA Turkey; Artist Kacey Wong protesting against the Causeway Bay Books disappearances, photo: Kacey Wong, licensed under Creative Commons; French soldiers patrol in front of the Louvre Museum Pyramid’s main entrance in Paris, photo: Charles Platiau / Reuters; Aung San Suu Kyi speaks to supporters in the Hlaing Thar Yar Township in Yangon, Myanmar on 17 November 2011, photo: Htoo Tay Zar, licensed under Creative Commons; Kandol Lake, Pakistan, photo: Ameer Boii, licensed under Creative Commons pp 162–3 (Colour) A man takes the pulse of a woman who was stabbed at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2015, photo: Rudy Perez, © The Miami Herald; Assemble group photo, 2014, courtesy the artists; Ellsworth Kelly, Méditerannée, 1952, oil paint on wood; Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015, © the artist, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Ai Weiwei, Lesbos, 2016, photo: Rohit Chawala, © India Today; SALT Beyoğlu exterior view, courtesy SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul. (B/W) China air pollution, licensed to public domain; David Bowie, Tweeter Center, Tinley Park, IL, US, 2002, photo: Adam Bielawski, licensed under Creative Commons; Tsai Ing-Wen, photo: David Reid, licensed under Creative Commons pp 164–5 (Colour) Sandeep Mukherjee, The Sky Remains, 2015–16, courtesy the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Project 88, Mumbai; Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, photo: Joshua White / J WPICTURES; Revolution in the Making, Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016, 2016 (installation view), photo: Brian Forrest, courtesy Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles; Vantablack grown on tinfoil, courtesy Surrey NanoSystems, licensed under Creative Commons; The Met Breuer, New York, photo: Ed Lederman. (B/W) 2016 Mong Kok civil unrest, photo: Wpcpey, licensed under Creative Commons; Umberto Eco, photo: Rob Bogaerts, courtesy the Nationaal Archief and Spaarnestad Photo; Still from Fire at Sea, 2016, dir Gianfranco Rosi; Zaha Hadid, © Simone Cecchetti pp 166–7 (Colour) Saadiyat Island construction site, courtesy Gulf Labor Coalition; Malick Sidibé, Self-portrait, 1956, © the artist, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; One of the 26 posters from Wolfgang Tillmans’s ‘Between Bridges’ campaign for remaining in the EU; Galerie Perrotin, Seoul, photo: Chin Hyosook; Carmen Herrera, 2016 (installation view), photo: Adam Reich, courtesy Lisson Gallery, London,
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Milan & New York; Snøhetta expansion of the new SFMOMA, photo: Iwan Baan, courtesy SFMOMA. (B/W) Mossack Fonseca sign, photo: Valenciano, licensed under Creative Commons; Prince, courtesy Sound Options; Beyoncé Knowles, photo: Tony Duran, licensed under Creative Commons; Oppenheimer Blue diamond, courtesy Christie’s, London pp 168–9 (Colour) Video still of Narrative Devices, 2016, produced by Iconoclast, courtesy Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead project, 2006–13, photo: Corine Vermeulen, courtesy MOCAD and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts; Pavilion of Reflections, Manifesta 11, Zürich, photo: Wolfgang Traeger; The new Tate Modern, © Hayes Davidson and Herzog & de Meuron; Christo, The Floating Piers, 2014–16, Lake Iseo, Italy, photo: Wolfgang Volz, © the artist; Facade of the Maiiam Museum of Contemporary Art, courtesy Maiiam, Chiang Mai; Orlan, 1997, photo: Fabrice Lévêque, licensed under Creative Commons; Lady Gaga, Born This Way, 2016, photo: AlexKormisPS (ALM), licensed under Creative Commons. (B/W) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, presidential debate 2016, photo: BU Rob13 / Gage Skidmore, licensed under Creative Commons; Pokémon Go, photo: Health Gauge, licensed under Creative Commons; Antigentrification march, Los Angeles, August 2014, photo: Katie J / Enclave LA pp 170–71 (Colour) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2016, photo: denisbin, licensed under Creative Commons; Pete Doige’s identification card; Nicholas Serota, 2016, photo: Hugo Glendinning, courtesy Tate Modern, London; Winning proposal for the Guggenheim Helsinki Competition by Moreau Kusunoki Architectes, courtesy Moreau Kusunoki Architectes. (B/W) Irom Sharmila, 2006, photo: Vijay Mathur / Reuters; Opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics, 2016, in the Maracanã stadium, photo: Fernando Frazão / Agência Brasil, licensed under Creative Commons; Official photo of President Rousseff at Alvorada Palace on 9 January 2011, photo: Roberto Stuckert Filho / Presidência da República licensed under Creative Commons; Amatrice town destroyed by the earthquake, photo: Leggi il Firenzepost, licensed under Creative Commons; Colombian soldiers survey an area in San Juanito, Colombia, 1997, photo: Jose Gomez / Reuters; Production plant smokestacks, licensed to public domain; Kim Jong-un, photo: Zennie Abraham, licensed under Creative Commons pp 172–3 (Colour) MOCA Yinchuan, courtesy MOCA Yinchuan; Alec Baldwin, photo: David Shankbone, licensed under Creative Commons; Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, 2010, performance view, MOMA, New York; Pinback button of Malcolm X, courtesy Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Skarstedt, London, © Richard Davies. (B/W) Aleppo after an airstrike, September 2016, photo: Abdalrhman Ismail / Reuters; Gender neutral, 2016, drawing by Anna Vickery; Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi appears at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, 2016, photo: Pool New / Reuters; Bollywood, licensed to public domain
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For more on Carlos Zingaro, see overleaf
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Contributors
Martin Gayford is the art critic for The Spectator and has written books on Van Gogh, Constable and Michelangelo. Lucian Freud painted and etched his portrait, an experience he describes in his 2010 book Man with a Blue Scarf. His most recent book is A History of Pictures, cowritten with David Hockney. This month he traces power throughout art’s history. Thomas Forwood is a London-based arts consultant and writer. His experience and understanding of numbers has led to multiple articles analysing the art market and deciphering the economies that drive the artworld. He has explored subjects such as museum funding, art fairs, auction houses and private sales, and the markets for postwar art and design from Italy. He has worked for Christie’s and various commercial galleries, and acts as a consultant to museums and private collectors internationally. This month he analyses the funding streams of museums internationally.
Joshua Decter is a New York-based writer, curator, art historian and theorist. He has curated exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson; Apexart, New York; MCA Chicago; Kunsthalle Vienna; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. His Art Is a Problem: Selected Criticism, Essays, Interviews and Curatorial Projects (1986–2012) was published in 2013. He is the coauthor of Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993 (2013), and his writing is included in Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, out this year. Decter is a faculty member in the School of Visual Art’s MA curatorial practice programme in New York. This month he questions the social role of art. Michael Robinson
Contributing Writers Adeline Chia, Matthew Collings, Joshua Decter, Louisa Elderton, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Thomas Forwood, Martin Gayford, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Hettie Judah, I. Kurator, Heather Phillipson Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Trevor Paglen, Michael Robinson, Anna Vickery
is an information graphic designer who has worked in the field for 30 years. He has been head of graphics at The Guardian, Observer and guardian.co.uk for over a decade and acts as a consultant to NZZ am Sonntag, Berlingske and The Economist. His work has been awarded and acknowledged by the Design Museum, SND, D&AD and Malofiej. This month he breaks down the data of the Power 100.
Carlos Zingaro (preceding pages)
On 24 April 1975, one year to the day after a military coup overturned Portugal’s fascist dictatorship and ushered in freedom through the popular uprising of the ‘Carnation Revolution’, an extraordinary experimental comics magazine was launched. Fittingly, its title was Visão, or Vision. As comics writer, publisher and artist Marcos Farrajota comments in his recent 40th anniversary reprint compilation Revisão, published by Chili Com Carne, ‘For decades, the regime had forced Portuguese comics only to entertain children and promote education and nationalism. The authors of Visão broke with that tradition. In a country with serious economic problems, Visão was an unlikely magazine, with its luxurious air, bright acidic colours and libertarian policies.’ Shortlived, like the Carnation Revolution itself, this anthology ran for six fortnightly issues and then returned as a monthly for another six, folding with its 12th number. Still, as Farrajota insists, ‘Glorious failures like Visão are remembered forever.’ One of its foremost artists was Carlos ‘Zingaro’ Alves, world-renowned today as a live improviser on the violin. Born in 1948, he was the only son in an artistic family. “My father was a great black-
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and-white photographer, as were his mother and grandfather. He also loved the arts, cartooning and caricature, but he worked as a public employee all his life to support his family.” Drawing was also Zingaro’s early and lifelong passion, although from the age of four he began studying violin. Under the strict education system, only classical music was permitted, but Carlos recalls, “I was extremely curious and would play anything coming out of the radio, from Moroccan music to Magyar gypsy music, trying to improvise. When I was eight, one of my teachers accused me of playing violin like a zingaro, or ‘gypsy’, and it became my nickname.” In his teens, Zingaro took up classic violin professionally, but in 1969 he was conscripted into the army and sent to fight against local freedom fighters in the Portuguese colony of Angola from 1970 to late 1972. “I became aggressive. I stopped playing classical music and took up ‘free jazz’ and progressive rock from the US West Coast,” Zingaro says. He was also getting into the parallel revolutions in America’s underground comix and in France’s adult bandes dessinées, which directly inspired both his own comics-making and the publishers of Visão. As a member of the Portuguese progressive rock-folk
ArtReview
band Banda do Casaco, Zingaro and lyricist António Pinho first collaborated on a trippy satirical comic for the fanzine Evaristo in 1974, and this would lead to working on Visão. Among Zingaro’s solo pieces was ‘Cabral Eanes’, a combination of the names of the ‘discoverer’ of Brazil and the general recently elected as president of Portugal. This broadly satirical sci-fi antihero is contracted to colonise other planets using miniature patriotic heroes and a sex-pervert petcompanion who makes moralising speeches. “I was shooting in all directions!” Zingaro confesses. Sadly when Visão ended in 1976, so did Zingaro’s comics career, though not his other art projects. As he approaches seventy, he remains highly productive in music and the arts, and took up the offer to make his first Strip in decades for ArtReview. A surreal Alice in Wonderland-inspired collage, it has been partly built around the improvised titles he devises for his paintings, incorporating some theatrical backdrops and adding to them in expressive colour pencil and crayon. Currently performing and recording with his new chamber group, Nuova Camerata, while developing videos and another solo exhibition, Zingaro reflects, “I just wish I had more time…” Paul Gravett
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Art and photo credits
Text credits
on the cover and on pages 91, 100, 109, 119, 128, 135, 142 artwork by Trevor Paglen
The quote on the spine is from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell; the quote on page 47 is attributed to Oscar Wilde, date and veracity unknown; the quote on page 159 is attributed to Margaret Thatcher, date unkown
on page 182 illustration by Anna Vickery
November 2016
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A Curator Writes November 2016 I knock back a hearty slug of my Slovenian Quercus Pinot Bianco and look out across the river towards Somerset House. The October sunshine is surprisingly strong. Either that, or the Slovenian white wine has some sort of antifreeze agent in it that has rapidly warmed my innards. A tall, elegant African lady sits down opposite me despite the fact that there are a number of empty tables available on the pub terrace. She is blocking my view of the river, so I nod at her and gesture towards one of the neighbouring tables. She doesn’t move. “Ivan, it’s me.” The African lady has a surprisingly deep voice. And then I realise… “Christ, Sir Nick! What on earth do you think you look like?” “I always dress like this when I visit 1:54, the Contemporary African Art Fair. At Tate we have embraced the refusal of the ethnocentric gaze. Think back to our first thematic show, Century City…” “Christ, yes, what a mess that was,” I recall. “…just 15 years ago, and yet it prefigured the radically decentred artworld that has come about today.” The great man is taking off his swathes of Dutch wax-print fabric that anthropologists have noted are a powerful form of nonverbal communication between African women. A portly Indian barman comes towards us and I think we might be in trouble, but instead of stopping the great man undressing, he leans over and says, “The best space in Tate Modern is of course the Turbine Hall. A void at the heart of the building!” He bows theatrically and moves on. He looks awfully familiar. Sir Nick has now disrobed and sits in his usual reassuringly smart white shirt and dark jacket. The waiter reappears with a ‘Cheesy Does It’ sharing plate. “Thanks, Anish,” says Sir Nick. I haven’t heard a word: “Baked camembert! I haven’t seen one of these in a while,” I enthuse, diving in. “Look, Sir Nick, let’s get on with it. I want your job. It’s not so much that I want to be director of Tate Modern, it’s more that I love the building. I want to be in charge of a power station! I’ve always been intoxicated by power ever since Manifesta 6 was cancelled because angry Cypriot artists rose up against the power of curators…” “Interesting,” says Sir Nick as he pokes around the Meantime ale cheese fondue that has come with the sharing platter. “Of course, one of the things that the Turbine Hall has is a hum,” interjects the waiter, who is back. “And since then,” I continue, “I’ve always wanted to reassert the power of the curator over
these bloody artists and their ghastly dealers. I mean, what real power do they have? Picture hangers!” “A low ‘G’ from the turbines,” the waiter adds. He hums a note that I take to be a low ‘G’. Sir Nick joins in and so do I, as I don’t want to be impolite. I break off first. “You know, I’m not going to shy away from it. I want to be top of the Power 100. You did it once, although now of course you’re understandably on the slide. And I figure your job is my easiest route to the top.” “The hum is in fact G-sharp,” observes Sir Nick. The barman bows again at Sir Nick and moves off graciously. “I mean, I saw the advert for your job in the Guardian,” I continue, spearing the last bit of camembert and washing it down with a hearty glug of the Slovenian, “but you know I can’t be doing with interview panels. It went awfully badly at the ICA when I revealed my strategy would be to bring back my good chum Alan Yentob as chair of the council and get dear Anthony Fawcett to mastermind a revival of the Beck’s Futures.” “Good God, Ivan, you don’t think that advertisement was serious, do you?” Sir Nick has started laughing. “Anish, come over here, you’ll never guess. Ivan thinks that advertisement for my job was genuine!” The barman comes over and puts a Hog Chick sharing platter down before also laughing uproariously. I pick at the remnants of the now tepid cheese, not understanding the joke. “Good God, Ivan, we only put those adverts out to keep the mandarins at DCMS happy. I mean, there has to be a harmony in succession, someone who can safeguard the legacy. ‘The Holy Grail ’neath ancient Roslin waits…’” “‘…the blade and chalice guarding o’er Her gates!’” The barman finishes Sir Nick’s words. “Isn’t that from The Da Vinci Code, that terrible novel whose ludicrous plot hinges on the tomb of Mary Magdalene being beneath the Louvre?” I ask. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t tell me that you secretly believe that the Holy Grail is buried beneath Tate Modern and you are merely the custodians of some sort of ultimate power, greater even than the Power 100, that is occasionally hinted at in large-scale installation work sited in the Turbine Hall, like Anish Kapoor’s solid yet intangible Marsyas?” The two of them smile enigmatically back at me. I morosely pick up a buttermilk chicken wing and stare out over the river. I. Kurator
Hong Kong, 27 November 2016 We are proud to present our first 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design sale in Hong Kong, featuring this iconic piece by Gerhard Richter. Public viewing 24 – 27 November at The Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong
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Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild 776-1 (Abstract Painting) 92 x 82.1 cm (36 1⁄4 x 32 3⁄8 in.) Painted in 1992.
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