New York

· Olafur Eliasson

· "Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s"

· "Polaroids: Mapplethorpe"

· "Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976"

Chicago

· Karen Kilimnik

Los Angeles

· Lawrence Weiner

San Francisco

· Tino Sehgal

Cambridge, MA

· Chantal Akerman

Minneapolis

· Richard Prince

Philadelphia

· Frida Kahlo

· "Mike's World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators)

Fort Worth

· Martin Puryear

Elsewhere

· Takashi Murakami

· "On Procession"

Olafur Eliasson

MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through June 30

Few artists produce work as conceptually rigorous and simultaneously crowd-pleasing as Olafur Eliasson, who makes art in which capital-P Phenomenology traffics freely in fun-house aesthetics. His 2003 Weather Project illuminated nearly two million visitors at Tate Modern with a spectacular artificial sun, but US museumgoers have had precious few opportunities to experience firsthand the viewer involvement so central to Eliasson’s practice. Now, this midcareer retrospective—twenty-two of the artist’s sculptures, photographs, and installations made since 1993—promises to make up for lost time. The catalogue features essays by curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, Daniel Birnbaum, Pamela M. Lee, and others, as well as a conversation between Eliasson and Robert Irwin.

—Jordan Kantor

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"Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s"

SCULPTURE CENTER
NEW YORK
Through July 28

Alongside the jetty is the tunnel—not spiraling spectacle but subterranean breach. Both forms were equally important for Land art, yet the latter seems especially to have resonated with women artists, structuring works such as Alice Aycock's Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels, 1975, and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, 1973–76. This exhibition surveys the projects of Aycock, Holt, and eight other artists, providing a much-needed excavation of works that gesture less toward the sublime than the surreal: Agnes Denes's Wheatfield—A Confrontation, 1982, and Mary Miss's screens and veils from the '70s invoke ecological and mathematical systems as well as narrative and allegorical ones. Catherine Morris assembles eleven sculptures (many not shown since the '70s), alongside models, drawings, and documentation of site-specific projects, aiming to deepen rather than restrict this terrain.

—Michelle Kuo

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"Polaroids: Mapplethorpe"

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
NEW YORK
Through September 07

In her essay for the publication accompanying the Whitney's upcoming presentation of Robert Mapplethorpe's Polaroid work, curator Sylvia Wolf illuminates the infamous artist's "lifelong passion for using the camera to penetrate appearances." If the metaphor seems too perfect, given Mapplethorpe's best-known, hypersexual subject matter and allusions, its valences nonetheless acquire unexpected subtlety in this exhibition, which focuses on an underexamined early body of work. Bringing together roughly one hundred Polaroids produced between 1970 and 1975 (many being shown for the first time), the selective survey evidences Mapplethorpe in the making. Here already are the artist's most persistent tropes: faces, flowers, and phalli. Yet these are marked with a tender eye, no less "penetrating" but nonetheless surprisingly fleeting, sometimes even shy.

—Johanna Burton

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"Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976"

JEWISH MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through September 21

Although Abstract Expressionism is hardly undertheorized, this exhibition nevertheless promises a fresh take on those fabled denizens of Tenth Street. Featuring fifty seminal works by thirty-one stalwarts, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Bontecou, the show contextualizes postwar cultural production between the Holocaust and the blithe likes of Levittown. By placing unprecedented emphasis on contemporaneous academic criticism and the mass media, this show—organized in collaboration with the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and with a catalogue featuring contributions by curator Norman L. Kleeblatt, Mark Godfrey, Caroline A. Jones, and others—claims the persistent centrality of social history.

—Suzanne Hudson

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Karen Kilimnik

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
CHICAGO
Through June 08

Karen Kilimnik’s trademark cocktail of ardor and acidity, camp figuration and dispersed installation, pop iconography and historical idioms (most recently, maritime painting and French Empire design) has exerted such a wide influence that this exhibition, her first major US survey, feels long overdue. Curated by Ingrid Schaffner with a generous selection of some eighty works made since the early 1980s—paintings early and recent, scatter pieces from the ’90s, heretofore rarely seen photographs and videos—plus an accompanying catalogue with essays by Wayne Koestenbaum and others, the show should help make up for lost time.

—Elizabeth Schambelan

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Lawrence Weiner

THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART LOS ANGELES
LOS ANGELES
Through June 14

In the fall of 1968 my wife, Eleanor, and I were living in a small tract house in Solana Beach, a little beach town about twenty miles north of the Mexican border. We were newcomers to Southern California, so we were pleasantly surprised by the unexpected visit of three members of the New York art world—Seth Siegelaub, Joseph Kosuth, and Larry Weiner, who hung around for lunch and some gossip before they took off for Tijuana, where Larry was going to toss a carton of cigarettes across the border, a Fluxus-type performance that was a realization of his scenario text:

AN OBJECT TOSSED FROM ONE COUNTRY TO ANOTHER.

It somehow seems appropriate that just as visitors to the Museum of Modern Art are enjoying the vaulting ambition and the visceral disturbance provoked by traversing the massive torqued-steel environments of Richard Serra, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles are preparing a comprehensive retrospective of the work of the Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, whose signature works consist mainly of casually displayed brief pieces of text. If the Serra works deploy copious technical and material resources to produce a purely physical effect, the Weiner works deploy spare and elegant linguistic resources to produce an intellectual and poetic effect.

But what form do the Weiner pieces take, and how do they work? In a gallery they usually appear as a few printed words stenciled on or affixed to the wall; simple, sometimes enigmatic, phrases, offering something to think about but providing few clues as to how to go about that thinking. Take a typical 1995 piece: two juxtaposed phrases—

BALLS OF WOOD BALLS OF IRON

—positioned at angles to each other fairly high on the gallery wall. The two materials named emerge from different levels of technology, both slightly archaic. So is the phrasing. Are balls of wood the same as wooden balls or wood balls? Does the of call attention to the production process? The material? Someone might say, “She was carrying three balls of wool.” But what native English speaker would say, “She was carrying three balls of wood,” outside of a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme? “She had three balls of wood / that told her where she stood.” What are wood balls good for? Not billiard balls or bowling balls. Croquet, maybe. Door handles. Newels. Finials. Buttons. balls of iron is easier. Ancient Chinese Baoding health balls. They’re hollow. You hold three in your hand and try to make them spin. If you get them spinning the right way, they produce different musical tones—melody leading to circulatory health.

Or maybe the words suggest a pawnshop or a chain gang.

But these readings are as slippery as rain and evaporate fairly quickly. Take an object tossed from one country to another. In 1962 it could have read as an ironic invitation to think of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now it could suggest a case of extreme rendition—a Canadian citizen kidnapped by the CIA and flown to Syria for torturing. But “tossed” is a casual term, unlike “hurled,” and less energetic or violent even than “thrown.” So perhaps the most meaningful reading would invoke this casualness more directly, even while taking into account the relation between countries, for which the passage of anything from one to another almost immediately suggests borders and contraband and anything-but-casual concerns with immigration. In Weiner’s Conceptualism, the individual readings are meaningful, but it’s the notion and value of the casual, the invitation to find meaning through the casual operation of the mind, that counts.

—David Antin

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