Arlene Shechet, Good Ghost, 2007, glazed ceramic, steel, cast concrete, 66 x 24 x 22".

"Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay"

WALKER ART CENTER
MINNEAPOLIS
Through November 29
Curated by Ingrid Schaffner and Jenelle Porter

Traditional Craft and medium-specific mastery meet the informe and neo-assemblage in “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay.” A terrible name but a timely premise: The show promises to parse a current vogue for sculpture’s most basic material—and, if we’re lucky, to pose larger questions about what it means to make objects at all now that de-skilled eclecticism has become its own cliché. Twenty-two artists contribute more than seventy works scaled large and small. Innovative American potter George E. Ohr stakes out the historical horizon with pieces made at the tail end of the nineteenth century, while bad boy Lucio Fontana marks the turf for Conceptualists who like to get their hands dirty.

— Frances Richard

Dan Graham, Performer/Audience/Mirror, 1977. Performance view, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 1977.

Dan Graham

WALKER ART CENTER
MINNEAPOLIS
Through January 15 2010
Curated by Chrissie Iles and Bennett Simpson

Since 1965, when he began producing the diagrams and photo-text magazine pieces that would become landmarks of Conceptual art, Dan Graham has made a series of swerves in his practice through video and film and performance to the architectural pavilions of the 1980s and beyond. This body of work—along with his early stint as a gallerist showing art by friends such as Carl Andre and Robert Smithson, and his energetic activities as a critic and speaker—has earned him near-legendary status. Artists today find a potent model in Graham’s integration of the conditions of exhibition and media reception into his own work; in his shape-shifting modus operandi; in his omnivorous cultural appetites. (His long-standing obsession with rock ’n’ roll, for instance, has given rise to extensive writings and the videos Minor Threat, 1983, and Rock My Religion, 1984.) And yet, due to these very qualities, institutions have had difficulty assimilating and presenting his work: MoCA’s forty-year survey is his first retrospective in the United States. Following on the heels of “Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can see” (co-organized by MoCA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007), the show thus marks another watershed in the American reception of Conceptually oriented practitioners whose projects, initiated in the ’60s, have long been influential among artists even as they were sidelined for decades on the US museum circuit.

Tracing the evolution of Graham’s practice, the exhibition aims to loosely unite the artist’s divergent production around “the changing relationship of individual to society as mirrored through American mass media and architecture at the end of the twentieth century,” per cocurators Chrissie Iles and Bennett Simpson. The show, comprising about one hundred works, will navigate vastly different kinds of visual and perceptual experiences, from the private space of the page to screen-based and time-based works to the emphatically public pavilions. The events program will include a panel on music and collaboration featuring Graham, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore, in addition to other talks and screenings. The catalogue, copublished with MIT Press, boasts essays by Rhea Anastas, Beatriz Colomina, Iles, and Simpson, among others, as well as two new interviews with Graham. The volume will be a substantial addition to the growing body of critical writing on the artist.

The show has not been unaffected by MoCA’s very public financial crisis; in a last-minute change, the museum announced in November that the retrospective would be installed in MoCA’s main Grand Avenue space, as cost-cutting moves prompted the six-month (and perhaps indefinite) closure of the Geffen Contemporary. For decades, Graham’s work has reflected on the public and institutional vicissitudes of artmaking; coming at such a fraught moment, the exhibition attests to MoCA’s own near-legendary support of critical and challenging art projects.

— Liz Kotz

Haegue Yang, Dehors, 2006,
two slide projectors (Kodak Dissolver), 162 slides.

Haegue Yang

WALKER ART CENTER
MINNEAPOLIS
Through February 28 2010
Curated by Doryun Chong

In case you were wondering, Haegue Yang’s venetian-blind installations at the Venice Biennale—in the Arsenale and again in the Korean pavilion—were not intended as a reference to the city. No, those slatted shades (in addition to lamps, heaters, audio equipment, and scent blasters) are central to a distinctive sculptural vocabulary the artist has been tweaking for nearly two years. That body of work, which arises from Yang’s poetic engagement with politically charged biographies, saw its high point in Yearning Melancholy Red (coproduced by the Walker and REDCAT in Los Angeles, where it debuted in 2008). The installation forms the centerpiece to this survey of roughly a dozen works, the artist’s first museum solo show in the US (following an extensive round on the biennial and kunsthalle circuit).

— Philip Tinari

Luc Tuymans, Der Diagnostische Blick V (The Diagnostic View V), 1992, oil on canvas, 22 7/8 x 16 1/2".

Luc Tuymans

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS
COLUMBUS, OH
Through January 3 2010
Curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth

After almost twenty-five years of mature production, Luc Tuymans’s reputation precedes him, and the contours of his artistic accomplishment are finally coming into focus. With his muted palette and pared-down painterly vocabulary, the Belgian artist has developed a personal yet remarkably resonant practice that embraces the limits of perception and communication while arguing vehemently for his medium as a vital, critical art form. As large as Tuymans looms in contemporary painting conversations, however, this seventy-work retrospective, which unites long-separated series and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Bill Horrigan and Joseph Leo Koerner, among others, is his first substantial American showing, but it promises to make up for lost time with unprecedented depth.

— Jordan Kantor

Arshile Gorky, The Betrothal, 1947, oil on canvas, 50 5/8 x 39 1/4". © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
PHILADELPHIA
Through January 10 2010
Curated by Michael Taylor

When he took his own life in 1948 at age forty-four, Arshile Gorky was not only in the prime of his career but also in a sweet spot in the history of American art. No less a deft draftsman than a dazzling colorist, the artist had addressed advanced painting’s imperative at the time head-on: to work through the legacies of Picasso and Surrealism and arrive at a personal, abstract vernacular. The results, as they say, are history. Gorky’s large canvases, which remain emblematic of the New York School, will join sculptures, drawings, and prints in this 180-work retrospective, introducing to a new generation a seminal figure for whom painting’s stakes were a matter of life and death.

— Jordan Kantor

Guy Ben-Ner, Moby Dick, 2000, still from a color video, 12 minutes 35 seconds.

Guy Ben-Ner

MASS MOCA
NORTH ADAMS, MA
Through March 31 2010
Curated by Susan Cross

Whether clandestinely setting up house with his wife and kids in functioning IKEA showrooms, performing a slapstick version of Moby-Dick with his daughter in a suburban kitchen, or having his son pretend to be a feral child encountering civilization for the first time (to cite three of the eight videos in Mass MoCA’s exhibition, which also includes drawings and costumes), Israeli-born artist Guy Ben-Ner clearly knows how to have fun. Indeed, the artist’s overt sociopolitical critiques—the détournement of IKEA’s lifestyle propaganda, the parody of white-goods fetishization, and the critical take on education, say, in the examples above—risk seeming pat or contrived in relation to the politics of advocating good times with the family. Nevertheless, it is tempting to set cavils aside in the face of Ben-Ner’s vaudevillian chirpiness—especially, perhaps, with a newly commissioned video that features the artist and Mass MoCA’s director in a “Beckett-like” scenario.

— Alexander Scrimgeour