KOREA JOONGANG DAILY  23 FEBRUARY 2011
 
 

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — January and February are known as the slowest months in the local art world. Private galleries don’t arrange many new exhibitions during this time because collectors tend to become frugal after the Christmas and Lunar New Year holidays, gallery representatives say. The same has been true this year.

But judging by the three new exhibitions at galleries in Cheongdam-dong, southern Seoul, one of the city’s major districts for art, the slow season is finally coming to an end.

PKM Trinity Gallery’s exhibition “TEXT/VIDEO/FEMALE: Art after 60s” opens tomorrow. With 21 works, the scale of the show is rather small, but the names of the participating artists are big. The names include Louise Bourgeois, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Paik Nam-june, Martin Creed and Tracey Emin. With their participation, the show offers an overview of contemporary art since the 1960s.

“The adoption of text into fine art, the use of video as new media and the active emergence of female artists are the keys of contemporary art,” Park Kyung-mi, PKM Trinity Gallery’s director, said about the title and concept of the show.

Those who saw Oliver Stone’s 2010 film “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” may recognize the painting “Second Chance Nurse” by American artist Richard Prince, which is part of the exhibition. The painting, which appears in the film, is part of the artist’s well-known “Nurse” series that was inspired by the titles and cover art of pulp fiction. According to the gallery, Prince used inkjet printing to transfer the images of the book covers onto canvas. He then painted over them with acrylics.

Meanwhile, Opera Gallery will show works by two of the world’s most popular female contemporary artists beginning on March 10.

The gallery juxtaposes the vivid paintings and sculptures of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has described herself as an “obsessive artist,” with the vivid sculptures of French artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

“[The two artists] share common points,” the gallery said in a statement. “Both of them suffered abuse in childhood and sublimated the trauma into art. And the two greatly improved women’s status in the art world.”

Lastly, MC Gallery, located at the midpoint between PKM Trinity and Opera Gallery, is running an exhibition featuring the well-known English land artist Richard Long. The exhibition continues through April 2.

Long is known for his walks through and respect for nature. He arranges objects, such as stones and fallen tree branches, into certain shapes on the spot and takes pictures of the resulting sculpture. Sometimes, he brings the objects into a gallery and rearranges them in order to bring viewers closer to nature.

His installation, “Vermont Georgia South Carolina Wyoming Circle,” which currently fills the gallery’s narrow first floor, is made of red, white, gray and green stones that he gathered in various parts of the United States.

 
— Moon So-young, Korea JoongAng Daily
In association with the International Herald Tribune

 
 
“TEXT/VIDEO/FEMALE: Art after 60s” starts tomorrow and runs through March 23. Admission is free. The gallery is open from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. The gallery is in the Trinity Place building across the street from the Galleria Department Store’s east wing in Cheongdam-dong. Call (02) 515-9496 or visit www.pkmgallery.com.

“Ladies of Legend” starts on March 10 and runs through April 10 at Opera Gallery, on the first floor of the Nature Poem building near the Cheongdam crossroads. Admission is free. Hours are 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. Go to Cheongdam Station, line No. 7, exit 9, and walk for 10 minutes. Call (02) 3446-0070 or visit www.operagallery.com.

The Richard Long solo show continues through April 2. Admission is free. Hours are 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. MC Gallery is located between Galleria Department Store and the Nature Poem building. Call (02) 517-4088 or 9088 or visit www.gallerymc.com.

 
Image 1: The painting “Dots Obsession (Zoxa)” (2005) by Yayoi Kusama and the sculpture “L’arbre de vie (#74/75)” by Niki de Saint-Phalle are part of the “Ladies of Legend” exhibition at Opera Gallery.

Image 2: “Second Chance Nurse” (2003) by Richard Prince is part of the “TEXT/VIDEO/FEMALE: Art after 60s” exhibition at PKM Trinity Gallery.

Image 3: “Vermont Georgia South Carolina Wyoming Circle” (1987) by Richard Long is on display at MC Gallery. Images provided by the artists and galleries.

ARTDAILY.ORG  15 FEBRUARY 2011
 
 

BASEL — From February 16 to May 15, 2011, Museum Tinguely is showing a comprehensive survey of the work of the artist Arman (1928–2005). The exhibition is a cooperative project with Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it was presented last autumn to resounding acclaim, attracting a large number of visitors. With some 80 works contributed by leading museums and private collections, as well as a selection of films in large-scale projection, video recordings and documents, the second installment of the show in Basel features seven thematically arranged galleries providing a unique overview of the artist’s complete oeuvre from the early 1950s to his late work in the 1990s. Museum Tinguely is placing a special focus on Arman’s artistic pursuits in the 1960s and 70s. Five years after the artist’s death, this is the first major retrospective of his work ever to be held at a Swiss museum. Following projects on Yves Klein (1999), Daniel Spoerri (2001) and Niki de Saint Phalle (2003), Museum Tinguely is now proud to present the oeuvre of yet another member of the Nouveaux Réalistes.

“I maintain that the expression of rubbish, of objects, possesses an immediate intrinsic value, without the will of aesthetic compositions obliterating them and likening them to the colors on a palette; furthermore, I introduce the meaning of the global gesture unremittingly and remorselessly.” — ARMAN, 1960

In the thematically organized show, important pieces have been selected to represent Arman’s major work groups, beginning with the Cachets and Allures d’Objets, abstract stamp and object prints on paper and canvas from the latter half of the 1950s. At the center of the show are Arman’s provocative artistic reactions to the throwaway society, his famous Poubelles and Accumulations, in which he showcases discarded everyday goods and trash in glass and perspex boxes as objets d’art. Also on view are key works from the Coupes and Colères series, as well as from the Combustions and Inclusions, demonstrating the artist’s varied forms of engagement beginning in the 1960s with the theme of destruction, deconstruction and transformation of the accoutrements of our daily lives. Completing the exhibition are a selection of Accumulations Renault, assemblages of factory-new auto parts, some of them monumental, which were commissioned in the late 1960s by Renault, and finally, examples of Arman’s paintings and resin casts using paint tubes, in which he turned his attention from the late 1960s to the end of the 1990s to the medium of abstract painting, or Art Informel.

Today, Arman’s works from the 1960s and ’70s seem startlingly topical; in particular his Accumulations, his Colères, involving the destruction of an object, and above all the Poubelles can be read as archaeological traces left behind by consumer society – astonishingly presaging how the throwaway lifestyle and the destruction of the planet would later become the most pressing concerns of our day.

Arman and Nouveau Réalisme

As a founding member of the Nouveaux Réalistes, Arman belonged to one of the most important artist groups of the postwar era, whose influence still persists today. The artists in Tinguely and Arman’s generation found themselves at a turning point, with modernist abstraction in painting having been declared dead. The Nouveau Réalisme manifesto (1960) took issue with Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism, art trends that dominated the Parisian art scene at the time. Pierre Restany noted in his text: “Easel painting has (…) served its term. Still sublime at times, it is approaching the end of a long monopoly.” Nouveau Réalisme proposed instead “the exciting adventure of the real seen for what it is.” This adventure, according to Restany, is only open to those who go about the world with a sociologically trained gaze, hoping that chance will rush in to assist, “whether it is the posting or the tearing down of a sign, the physical appearance of an object, the rubbish from a house or living room, the unleashing of mechanical affectivity, or the expanding of sensitivity beyond the limits of perception.”

Arman himself referred in 1960 to the object and the gesture as his primary media: “I maintain that the expression of rubbish, of objects, possesses an immediate intrinsic value, without the will of aesthetic compositions obliterating them and likening them to the colors on a palette; furthermore, I introduce the meaning of the global gesture unremittingly and remorselessly.”

Arman’s work in the 1950s

In Arman’s early work executed in the latter half of the 1950s (to which scant attention has been paid until now) the main artistic methods are already apparent that will set the tone for his entire career: the repetitive artistic gesture and the consistent use of everyday objects.

Interestingly enough, Arman came to the object by way of painting and concrete music, which he delved into intensely at the time. He was also influenced by the work of artists active in the 1920s such as Kurt Schwitters, Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman and Marcel Duchamp. In the mid-1950s he was close to Yves Klein, likewise from Nice and the inventor of International Klein Blue. During this period Arman conceived works on paper and canvas – the Cachets and Allures d’objets. In his Cachets he parts ways with the painting style of the École de Paris and uses rubber stamps to print all-over patterns on canvas in a kind of Écriture automatique. The Allures d’objets series, whose name comes from the music of Pierre Schaeffer, consists of abstract pictorial compositions formed by the accidental imprints and traces left behind by various objects dipped in paint and hurled at the canvas. Arman’s Cachets and Allures d’objets can be regarded as provocative reactions to the Informel painting and Abstract Expressionism that were all-pervasive at the time.

 
Image: A person walking in front of the art work “Chopin’s Waterloo” (1962) by French-born US artist Arman is seen at the exhibition “Arman” in the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. The exhibition “Arman” runs from 16 February until 15 May 2011. (EPA/GEORGIOS KEFALAS)

BOSTON GLOBE  8 FEBRUARY 2011
 
 

Revelatory Tufts show gives underseen ’60s artists their due.

International in scope but nicely focused (there are 67 works by 24 artists), “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” is the sort of smart, engaging, and revelatory exhibition we should see more of around here — and probably would, were it not for the innate conservatism of many of our major art institutions.

The show, at Tufts University Art Gallery, is the first modern thematic exhibition of any real ambition in these parts for ages. It features the work of artists — most of whose names won’t register with the wider public — who worked within the fairly porous parameters of the Pop Art movement in the socially, politically, and aesthetically convulsive 1960s.

The exhibition was conceived and organized by Sid Sachs, director of exhibitions at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It has been garnering plaudits in its two subsequent venues, first the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. It was recently named “Best Thematic Show Nationally” by the US section of the International Art Critics Association.

Pop art’s heyday came before the onset of feminism’s second wave. As such, it was perhaps the last major art movement to systematically exclude or downplay the contributions of women (although many would say subsequent movements fared only marginally better).

Deliberately revisionist, this exhibition brings to our attention at least a dozen artists who deserve to be better known. This in itself is exciting. Niki de Saint Phalle, Vija Celmins, and Yayoi Kusama all have established reputations. But there’s no good reason such artists as Kiki Kogelnik, Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Idelle Weber, Chryssa, and Dorothy Grebenak, and Marisol are not better known.

Marisol, in particular, is a bona fide star. She’s hardly unknown in the art world, but she ought to be a household name along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg. Here, unfortunately, she’s represented by just one work: a splendidly uncouth mixed media sculpture of a boxy John Wayne riding a wooden horse. Those who are keen to see more will have to wait for a Marisol retrospective slated to open at the Memphis Brooks Museum in 2014. (If the folks at the Museum of Fine Arts or the Institute of Contemporary Art have their wits about them, they will be pulling out all stops to bring it to Boston.)

I first saw “Seductive Subversion” in Philadelphia, where it was shambolically displayed across three separate venues, and can vouch for the superiority of the display at Tufts. Around 20 works have been added, and Amy Schlegel, director of galleries and collections at Tufts, has provided a helpful thematic overlay, grouping the works according to four common-sense themes.

Still, the result is by no means a perfect show. Much of the work cries out for conservation, and some of it makes you think its neglect was not entirely unwarranted. Unwittingly, the show reminds us that, for all its verve, much of the art produced under the rubric of Pop, by both men and women, was technically flimsy, politically naive, intellectually frivolous.

Pop always wanted to have it both ways. Just as such male Pop artists as Warhol and Britain’s Richard Hamilton seemed to waver between, on the one hand, mocking or critiquing mass culture and, on the other, reveling in it, female pop artists fell into a similar bind. The first part of the show conforms to type, gathering together works that seem to revel in seductive images of the female body, only to upend sexist preconceptions through exaggeration or sly shifts in context.

The show’s first work is a case in point. It’s a collage of hundreds of soft-core images of naked young women all looking directly out at the camera by Martha Rosler, the most overtly political artist in the show. Called “Hot House, or Harem,” the effect is reminiscent of Ingres’s “The Turkish Bath” and a zillion other male fantasies of limitless female availability.

Rosler is clearly attempting to convert the preposterousness of pornographic overload into accusation. But I’m not sure how well she succeeds. The tactic has something crudely obvious about it. And the women, after four decades of aggressive escalation in the pornographic stakes, look strangely innocent (at least of surgical enhancement) and, dare I say it, adorable.

More fun — and more effective in its deadpan wit — is Marjorie Strider’s “Triptych II, Beach Girl” of 1963. This playful parody of the girlie pinup ticks all the boxes of Pop: simplified and enlarged mass-media imagery, serial repetition, and, more obscurely, a fashion for “shaped” canvases — in this case, bikini-covered breasts made from sharply faceted wood that jut out from the canvas.

Converting only the girl’s breasts from two dimensions to three (they really do “pop”) is a brilliant burlesque, at once absurdly broad and just subtle enough (one can imagine formalist critics of the day discussing the breasts’ cubist faceting) to create palpable unease.

Much of the best work in the show, however, transcends preoccupations with gender politics, coming from places more immediately personal, experimental, and urgently felt. Sweden’s Barbro Östlihn is a particularly interesting case. Her painting “Sunflower” hits the eye with the mysterious force and abstract sophistication of a mandala merged with a commercial logo. Its presence is as strong — and seductive — as anything else in the show.

But Östlihn was overshadowed by her artist and performer husband, Öyvind Fahlström (whose work she collaborated on), and by other prominent male Pop artists (she was friends with Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, among others). “Sunflower” is presented here in a context that tries to link its flower petals with female genitalia and with the sexualized flower paintings of feminist icon Georgia O’Keeffe. But her work was not, in fact, much related to the body, as the Swedish art historian Annika Öhrner confirms in a catalog essay. Rather, she was interested in architectural facades, patterning, optical illusions, and photography.

Thus we see the danger of revisionist exercises like this one. Individual artists are often rescued from years of neglect only to be stuffed into boxes they do not really fit.

Luckily, most of the artists here escape such a fate. Kiki Kogelnik’s two paintings, inspired by space travel, X-rays, and science fiction, are hauntingly dematerialized arrangements of silhouetted human forms and ’60s-style patterning. They’re knockouts. Dorothy Grebenak’s hooked rugs reproducing baseball cards and banknotes are hilariously deadpan.

And Idelle Weber’s painting and related sculpture parodying the standard-issue urban professional man are brilliant. They hint at something dark and complex beneath the laminated glamour of workaday conformity — exactly the sort of thing “Mad Men” has been trying to explore on TV.

To reiterate: This show is smart, it looks great, and it’s got plenty of surprises. A better show on the same theme is easy to imagine, and it might come along one day. But don’t hold your breath.

 
— Sebastian Smee, Boston Globe

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.

 
“Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” at Tufts University Art Gallery (617-627-3518), 27 January – 3 April 2011.

 
Photo: “John Wayne 1963,” a mixed media sculpture by Marisol, in “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” at Tufts. (Collection of Colorado Springs Fine Art Center)

HANNOVERSCHE ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG27 JAN 2011
 
 

Die Werke von Niki de Saint Phalle brauchen viel Raum und sollen diesen im erweiterten Sprengel Museum bekommen. Doch noch fehlen für den Ausbau knapp zwei Millionen Euro an Drittmitteln.

In den sechziger und siebziger Jahren war Mitmachkunst besonders gefragt. Das Publikum sollte in Kunstaktionen einbezogen werden. Niki de Saint Phalle schuf als eine der wenigen Frauen in der damals noch stark männerdominierten Kunstwelt eindringliche Beispiele für Mitmachkunst, zum Beispiel ihr heute im Sprengel Museum Hannover befindliches Werk aus Hemd, Krawatte und einer Dartsscheibe mit dem vielsagenden Titel „Heiliger Sebastian oder Porträt meines Liebhabers“ von 1961. Das Publikum war aufgerufen, mit Pfeilen auf die Figur zu zielen – und tat das auch ausgiebig.

Aus dieser Phase stammt auch „Der Tod des Patriarchen“. Auch an der Figur aus Gips mit eingelegtem Kinderspielzeug – Gewehren, Soldatenpüppchen, Cowboys und kleinen Flugzeugen – durfte sich das Publikum abreagieren. Entsprechend mitgenommen sieht der Patriarchenstellvertreter heute aus. Freilich ist das Werk inzwischen eine Ikone der feministischen Kunst der Sechziger.

Die genannten „Schießbilder“ kamen im Jahr 2000 im Zuge der großzügigen Schenkung von Niki de Saint Phalle nach Hannover. Mit dem Einzug der Werke von Niki de Saint Phalle vor zehn Jahren wurde es endgültig eng im Sprengel Museum. Rund 400 Werke der populären Mutter der Nanas umfasst die Schenkung. Die großzügige Donation machte das hannoversche Museum auf einen Schlag zum wichtigsten Ort für die Kunst der 2002 verstorbenen Frankoamerikanerin.

Freilich stellten die zum Teil sperrigen Dinge aus Materialien wie Gips, Stoff oder Maschendraht das Haus auch vor Probleme – Platz- und Konservierungsprobleme.

Manches Werk ragt meterhoch auf (die Figur „Dolorès“ oder das „Nana-Haus“), anderes hängt vom Plafond oder füllt ganze Wände. Isabelle Schwarz, Kuratorin am Sprengel Museum, gibt eine ungefähre Vorstellung von den Ausmaßen: „Man könnte mit den Werken, wenn man die Papierarbeiten dazunimmt, die gesamten oberen Sammlungsräume plus die Wechselausstellungshalle füllen.“

Derzeit lagert das Gros der Werke in Depots innerhalb und außerhalb des Museums. Im erweiterten Museum werde die Schenkung nicht nur einen riesigen Lagerraum bekommen, sagt Museumsdirektor Ulrich Krempel, „sondern auch deutlich mehr Ausstellungsfläche“. Krempel möchte Niki de Saint Phalle im Kontext von Künstlern wie Daniel ­Spoerri oder Yves Klein zeigen. „Ich möchte, dass sie nicht mehr so verkitscht transportiert wird, wie das oft noch in den Köpfen der Leute geschieht.“

Viele denken bei Niki de Saint Phalle vor allem an die Nanas, ihre heiteren Matronen, die Künstlerin hatte sich aber in ihrer Jugend als zornige junge Frau einen Namen in der Kunstwelt gemacht. In ­einem Gedicht hatte sie 1961 erklärt: „Ich schoss auf Papa / alle Männer / kleine Männer / große Männer / bedeutende Männer / dicke Männer / Männer / meinen Bruder / die Gesellschaft / die Kirche / den Konvent / die Schule / meine Familie / meine Mutter / alle Männer / Papa / mich selbst / … ich schoss, weil / das Spaß machte und mich gut fühlen ließ …“

Aus heutiger Sicht mögen solche Ab­reaktionsaktionen etwas plakativ erscheinen – oder gar als terroristische Phantasien ausgelegt werden. Unbestritten aber kommt Niki de Saint Phalle das Verdienst zu, sich als eine der wenigen Frauen in der Kunst der sechziger Jahre eine Stellung erkämpft zu haben.

Und so wird heute vor allem ihrem Frühwerk eine Schlüsselrolle in der emanzipatorischen und feministischen Kunst zuerkannt. Das Sprengel Museum kann den Stellenwert der Kunstrebellin mit einer Fülle von Werken belegen. Es besitzt auch den Originalschießanzug und das Gewehr der bildschönen Gräfin mit dem Karabiner.

2012 beginnen die Arbeiten am 25 Millionen Euro teuren Erweiterungsbau. Derzeit fehlen noch knapp zwei Millionen Euro an Drittmitteln. Informationen zur Sponsoring-Kampagne „Mehr Museum“ gibt es unter www.mehr-museum-de.

 
— Johanna Di Blasi, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung

 
Image 1: „Heiliger Sebastian oder Porträt meines Liebhabers”, 1961. (© Handout)