Urs Lüthi
MACRO - MUSEO D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA ROMA
Via Reggio Emilia 54
December 17–April 5
Urs Lüthi, “Just Another Story About Leaving” (detail), 1974–2006, twenty-five black-and-white photographs, each 24 x 16 1/2".
Urs Lüthi’s latest exhibition short-circuits the artist’s practice in an infinite play of references and self-quotations. The show, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and Elena Forin, is a panorama that opens onto Lüthi’s life and work, which has always questioned the boundaries between public and private spheres and the limits of art. “Just Another Story About Leaving,” 1974–2006, a photographic series that gives the exhibition its title, is emblematic of Lüthi’s modus operandi, where his central concern is self-representation and transformation, typical of poetics pertaining to the “body as language” but exaggerated by an ironically self-referential narcissism that activates a disturbing artistic-existential voyage. The work brings to mind the identity-related nomadism that, since Duchamp and Claude Cahun, has passed through the territories of art––I am thinking here of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Luigi Ontani, and Orlan.
There are various residual traces of the artist’s body in the show, as in Autoritratto a mani vuote (Self-Portrait with Empty Hands), 2009, a sculpture that draws on the iconography of the religious figure with certain destabilizing elements: distressing posture, clown’s nose. The piece inhabited various places in Rome before being definitively “consecrated,” at the end of a physical and metaphoric journey, at MACRO, where it now stands. Here as in the rest of the show, Lüthi’s aesthetic strategy embraces the space of the double, yet he implies a paradox that never leads to a definitive result and ceaselessly acts in the reconfiguration of an equilibrium, of an encounter and relationship––intermittent but always different––between viewer and work, between those who see and that which is seen.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
— Eugenio Viola
“Old Ideas”
KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL, MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST
St. Alban-Rheinweg 60
January 16–March 14
View of “Old Ideas,” 2010.
Leonard Cohen originally called Dear Heather, his 2004 album, Old Ideas, a nod to its assemblage of literary and musical influences of yore. This month, the title—with the ardent wit and meaning of its original application intact—is taken up by the Berlin project space Silberkuppe (led by Dominic Eichler and Michel Ziegler) for a group show in Basel that engages numerous oldies—institutional critique, ideas of materiality and the built environment, feminist and queer theory—to surprisingly fresh effect. The exhibition’s crispness might have something to do with the breadth of its artists, who radically diverge in materials, gender, nationality, and age (Gerry Bibby is 31, Janette Laverriere an excellent 101) yet together make a cogent, inspired argument for the relevance of some old ideas—with all new works.
The Gegenwartskunst’s sunken, living-room-like first floor features a lean constellation of works that walk the line between design and utility. Laverriere’s interior-design sketches and abstract drawings are lit by a series of black triangular wall lamps, while nearby, Josephine Pryde’s print-covered photo tubes jutting off the wall in a neat row look more impressive—given enough space, they actually fill it—than I’ve seen installed elsewhere. A standout, Bibby’s sculptural parade of collapsed panels covered in concrete and text sprawls along the floor like a languid, encrusted, and glittery sentence, taking the idea of concrete poetry to the cleaners. Above this elegantly motley crew, Dirk Bell’s light box Panikearth, 2010, its middle four letters in emphasis, hovers like an anticonsumerist speech bubble.
Down the hall, the works seem more site-specific: Phyllida Barlow (making her museum debut here at age sixty-five) has built in situ an outsize architectonic structure that is equal parts ’60s-era gas station and bushwhacked UNICEF shelter. Its crusty surface features a vocabulary of gestural marks that gloriously apes modernist painterly mark making and perhaps critiques it: The marks simply cover the tracks of the structure’s making. Across the hall broods Karl Geiser’s magisterial bronze Cyclist, 1928–34, while the subject of Shahryar Nashat’s expert film upstairs charts the movement of the bronze from storage to museum, and the camera, at waist level, catches the art handlers’ own sculptural qualities. The film is a campy, elegant riot, like the exhibition itself, which makes the case that old ideas are never so new again as when placed in the right hands, young or not.
— Quinn Latimer
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