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U.S. Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
Look from Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall/winter 1991–92 “French Cancan” collection. © Patrice Stable/Jean Paul Gaultier.
Jean Paul Gaultier
DE YOUNG MUSEUM
SAN FRANCISCO
Through August 19
Curated by Thierry-Maxime Loriot
Remember the ’80s? No, not the art, but what you might have worn to the art openings and the clubs, the bars, the chichi restaurants: the whole glittering, louche shebang. For many who aspired to cutting-edge glamour, this meant wearing Jean Paul Gaultier. Applauding one of fashion’s most enduring enfants terribles, this retrospective, subtitled “From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” will parade nearly 130 ensembles from the designer’s many couture and prêt-à-porter collections from as early as 1976. Supporting materials will abound, including sketches, as well as photographs and videos of runway shows, dance performances, and the like. Along with opulent illustrations and an essay by Suzy Menkes, the catalogue offers interviews with a band of Gaultier’s muses and collaborators, from Madonna to Martin Margiela, as well as with the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Valerie Steele and the consummate showman himself.
— David Rimanelli
Katharina Wulff, Untitled, 2011, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 24 1/2".
“New Work: Katharina Wulff”
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
SAN FRANCISCO
Through September 4
Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio
Despite their apparently unfinished, or mute, passages, Katharina Wulff’s paintings tend to brim and overflow, like an actor’s complex delivery of a particularly overwrought line. The German idiom durch die Blume sprechen, which refers to criticism couched in a veil of politesse (literally, “speaking through a flower”), begins to describe the mode of her paintings’ rhetoric. Their impact is warped, brutal—and delayed. Extremely distilled and serene landscapes seem to have all the air sucked out. The painted terrain conceals as it describes a topography somewhere between a picturesque folly, a park “landscaped” over the rubble of bombed-out cities, and a vulnerable, prone body. In bluntly framed paintings of heads and personages, Wulff sets hair, applies makeup, seals mouths, and blinds eyes with paint. The SF MoMA presents the artist’s first museum show in the US—a rare opportunity to take in Wulff’s work, here represented by some twenty paintings realized over the past six years.
— Nick Mauss
Joachim Koester, I myself am only a receiving apparatus, 2010, still from a black-and-white film in 16 mm, 3 minutes 33 seconds.
Joachim Koester
MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER
CAMBRIDGE, MA
Through July 8
Curated by João Ribas
Hypnagogia, mystical languages, and anarchist free towns—this is the stuff transgression is made of, but in Joachim Koester’s hands such arcane interests aren’t accompanied by visionary claims or turned into symphonic Gesamtkunstwerke. Instead, the artist’s nonspectacular explorations of esoterica address what has become imperceptible to culture. Koester turns these blind spots into images of what he calls “invisible indexes”: While some facts of social reality are affirmed and reinscribed by structures of power, others trickle down through history, formulating archives of past events and practices that have been moralized out of existence, deemed irrational, or forgotten. “To navigate, in a genuine way, in the unknown . . . ,” Koester’s first major US museum show, will prove his allegiance to these minor histories as exhibited in seven video and film installations and six photographic projects, made between 1996 and today.
— Lars Bang Larsen
Richard Serra, Untitled, 1972–1973, lithographic crayon on paper, 37 3/4 x 49 3/4".
Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective
THE MENIL COLLECTION
HOUSTON
Through June 10
Curated by Bernice Rose, Michelle White, and Gary Garrels
Richard Serra has described his sculptural practice as being grounded in drawing: Drawing as “cut” represents the division of a sheet by a line—and, in turn, of actual space by the edge of a steel plate. He has also approached drawing as a relentless, heavy application of medium—generally black paint stick—to support. And the huge “installation drawings,” which occupy whole walls, seize control of one’s sensation of the space of a room. Organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, this first full-scale retrospective of Serra’s drawings features roughly fifty pieces, including some made specifically for the show. It may well afford us an alternate history of the artist’s career.
— Jeffrey Weiss
Rachel Hecker, Jesus #1 (Viggo Mortensen/Lord of the Rings), 2011, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 34".
“It Is What It Is. Or Is It?”
CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON
HOUSTON
Through July 29
Curated by Dean Daderko
Considering the vast art-historical legacy of Duchamp’s invention of the readymade, it seems wise that Dean Daderko has opted for a protean approach in curating “It is what it is. Or is it?” Daderko’s inaugural project at the museum aims to highlight the diverse artistic formations that have descended from Duchamp’s acerbic dispositif, paying particular attention to the multivalent, global contexts of media, technology, and social histories from which artists are drawing today. Among the contributions from eighteen figures, expect to see Bill Bollinger’s little-remembered late-’60s and early-’70s sculptures presented alongside the con- temporary wares of self-dubbed “readymade artist” Claire Fontaine, Pratchaya Phinthong’s Genpei Akasegawa–esque thousand-baht note, and Rachel Hecker’s messianic paintings of long-haired, bearded celebrities—just to hint at the multifarious items shuffled into this curatorial shell game. Be on the look-out, as well, for the show’s catalogue, containing essays by the curator and Lucy Lippard.
— Sam Pulitzer
Vija Celmins, Eraser, 1967, acrylic on balsa wood, 12 x 18 x 4".
“Lifelike”
WALKER ART CENTER
MINNEAPOLIS
Through May 27
Curated by Siri Engberg
One thing missing from French sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s phenomenology of postwar capitalism is an account of the objects that populate the everyday world. Even for Jean Baudrillard, Lefebvre’s student, consumer goods function more as signs and ciphers than as obdurate things. But it is among these uncanny objects and signs that the routine dramas of daily life are played out; not surprisingly, this domain has attracted artistic interventions ranging from the typographic to the surreal and beyond. “Lifelike” brings together ninety examples of engagements with the quotidian over the past five decades by more than fifty artists, including Vija Celmins, Robert Gober, Kaz Oshiro, and Charles Ray. Questions of materiality and authenticity will be posed with wit and ingenuity—the necessary elements of an updated “critique of everyday life”—in equal measure.