Phyllida Barlow, untitled: 21 arches, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The majority of her sculptures are towering structures that dwarf the spectator as if one were standing in a forest. Barlow dilutes the nature of her mundane media by her exquisite use of color, whether included by virtue of fabric, electrical tape or spray paint. For siege, Barlow exhibits her characteristically massive structures as similar to pieces I have seen previously, such as untitled: 21 arches (2012) and untitled: crushed boxes (2012). In pieces such as untitled: balcony (2012) and untitled: broken stage (2012) however, she adds more of a tangible architectural thread that differ slightly from her conceptual-based sculptures. Her work mimics the urban environment in both materiality and the nature of the imposing structures that swallow – or impede upon – the viewer.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: crushed boxes, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

With pieces such as untitled: crushed boxes (2012) Barlow depicts weight through the manner in which her boxes pile upon a fabric cushion, thin or bulging in parts, depicting the sensation of being crushed. Her work maneuvers within a certain corporeal consciousness similar to the work of Eva Hesse or Robert Morris in which the weight – or the interior – of the body is made manifest through the use of material. With aspects of both Arte Povera and Minimalism, Barlow’s work is sensational in its rawness, and though I rather missed the space at Hauser & Wirth London that added an irreplaceable dimension to her work, Barlow’s structures are not to be missed in the immense setting of the New Museum’s spaces.

On the third floor, Tacita Dean’s (b. 1965, England) exhibition entitled Five Americans explores the theme of preservation and memoriam through filmmaking as it intersects with various artistic mediums such as painting, writing and dance. By way of 16mm films, Dean features five influential American artists spanning several generations: Julie Mehretu, Cy Twombly, Leo Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg and Merce Cunningham. Works such as Edwin Parker (2011) and Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011) follow artists Cy Twombly and Claes Oldenburg respectively in their studios, spaces that despite the aura attached to these renowned artists by name are places of quotidian banality of comings and goings.

Tacita Dean, Manhattan Mouse Museum, 2011, 16mm film, color, optical sound, 16 min, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London

There is an aspect of prescience in Dean’s works, as each are bound by a common thematic thread that deals with the notion of expiration. For instance in The Line of Fate (2011), Dean sits with art historian Leo Steinberg as he finishes his last book about Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo before his death months later, a fact unknown at the time when making the film. This is a similar case with Edwin Parker in which Dean films Cy Twombly in his studio amongst what would be his final artworks during his last months alive. Even in her other works albeit more subtle, the theme of preservation becomes contingent upon the cognitive artistic process that she poignantly captures.

The Parade presented by Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978, Sweden) with music by Hans Berg (b. 1978, Sweden) is found in the museum’s next-door space ‘Studio 231’. In an eccentric field of dazzling puppetry, a parade it is. A snaking trail made up of hundreds of exotic and fictitious birds scatter the floor under spotlights, frozen in mid-preen and warble. Each bird installation – whether sparrow or human-sized – has the craftsmanship of a Julie Taymor theater prop, with each muslin feather painted in an ombré of fanciful hues. Alongside her puppets, five animations are projected on the walls playing to the discordant melodies of Hans Berg’s compositions.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Immediately upon entering the space, the menagerie comes alive with the eerie tinkering of chimes, a soundtrack that gives life to the nightmarish aspect of Djurberg’s mad animals and sinister animations. Her animation videos typically depict women as the central character in an anti-heroic role, often times as victims of absurd cruelty flecked with sexual overtones. Her videos feature handmade puppets both animals and humans, crudely rendered from clay, fabric, string and dolls hair, with lumps, bumps, spidery limbs and clownish faces. The Parade as a body of work exists in a similar abject vein as her various other works, yet in this exhibition she focuses on the avian rituals of flocking, mating and pageantry. Her videos portray explicit aspects of cruelty, betrayal and greed, in which her characters – both animal and human – play out instances of physical and psychological savagery.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Djurberg’s work is brilliant in its manner of transparency. I am taken with the way in which she casts a light on the undesirable or abject aspects of human and animal behavior as the cynosure of her métier. And as usual, Berg’s musical compositions coupled with Djurberg’s claymation videos and theatrical installations presents a captivating mastery that dutifully emanates from their projects time and time again.

Phyllida Barlow’s siege runs through June 24^th, Tacita Dean’s Five Americans runs through July 1^st and The Parade by Nathalie Djurberg with Hans Berg runs through August 26^th. For more information visit the New Museum’s site.

Spread from Paul Thek notebook #63, 1974; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translate the subjective experience into the artistic process were explored in In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, personal and self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek – ‘If you don’t like this book you don’t like me.’, on show at The Modern Institute till 2 June 2012, where fragments of the life of an artist, as narrated through pages of notebooks, become a part of the works on display.

Paul Thek; Untitled (cityscape with twin towers), 1972; Acrylic on canvas; 241.5 x 165 cm; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of exhibitions and publications on Paul Thek, perhaps as part of an effort to re-insert him into the history of art. Though well-received in Europe during the 1970s, he died in relative obscurity in 1988 after his return to the United States. Thek’s name is often cited in relation to the Technological Reliquaries or “meat pieces”, a series of works made in the 1960s where body parts appearing as chunks of flesh were presented in geometric vitrines, a revelry of one’s fleshly mortality within the confines of the composed exterior of minimalism. While these sculptures were solid and dense, he also made works from ephemeral materials with collaborators, creating immersive environments that lasted for the duration of the exhibition. While little documentation remains of these installations, about 80 of Thek’s notebooks were retrieved and carefully preserved after his passing.

Paul Thek - If you don’t like this book you don’t like me. Installation view, The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

The Technological Reliquaries are materially absent in the show. Knowledge of it is acquired through the supplementary reading materials provided. The artist’s notebooks, usually occupying this secondary position for signposts to an artist’s intentions, instead forms the core of the show, presented in the main artery of the gallery space alongside several of his paintings, and photographs by Peter Hujar in the gallery’s upper level.

Bust of Tomb Figure (Paul Thek) 1967/2010; Pigmented ink print; Sheet 51 x 40.6 cm, image 47 x 32 cm; Photograph Peter Hujar; Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

His notebooks reveal repeated scribbles of self-motivational phrases to meticulous lists and copying of religious texts.  Illustrations, drawings and watercolor works suggest a mind filled with both doubt and idealism, on the possibility of fulfillment within one’s earthly existence and a continual search for a higher spiritual being. Enclosed in vitrines, most of the notebooks are spread open to specific pages. Several remain shut. While the open pages disclose paradoxes, exuberance and anxieties that intimate the intentions behind the hybrid approach to the form and style of his works, it is the pages withheld from view that provokes one to consider the subjective voice of the hand behind how one is to like the book, and Paul Thek.

Cover of Paul Thek Notebook #68, 1978; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

Louise Bourgeois working on Sleep II in Italy, 1967. Photo: Studio Fotografico, Carrara. © The Easton Foundation.

In 2004, two boxes of what have been labelled Bourgeois’ ‘psychoanalytical writings’ were discovered by her assistant in her Chelsea home, and a further two in 2010. These thousands of loose-leaf sheets of paper recorded Bourgeois’ inner conflicts, dream recordings and self-probing analysis, commencing during the period when the artist began undergoing intense psychoanalysis at the hands of Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a follower of Sigmund Freud.

Louise Bourgeois, loose sheet, 13 September 1957, 26.7 x 20.3 cm. LB-0219, Louise Bourgeois Archive, New York. © The Easton Foundation.

With these in hand, curator Phillip Laratt-Smith published a volume of Bourgeois’ writings, and conceived the exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed. Currently tucked away in residential North London, the works could not have found a more suitable site than The Freud Museum – a home firmly entrenched in psychoanalytic history, where both its patriarchal namesake, and his daughter Anna, remained until their deaths.

With Bourgeois’ writings, drawings and sculptures housed throughout Freud’s former possessions and collections, a challenging and quite perilous dialogue is created, laying the groundwork for a very dangerous obsession that may inextricably fuse Bourgeois to Freud.

Louise Bourgeois's bronze Janus Fleuri, 1968, suspended over Freud's couch at The Freud Museum, London. Courtesy The Easton Foundation. Photo: Ollie Harrop. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Hanging above Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, the original brought with him from Vienna, is a work by Bourgeois often referred to as a self portrait of the artist. The bronze sculpture Janus Fleuri is a ambiguous form with connotations of sexuality, metamorphosis, and struggle. Swaying above the place where free association was born, Janus Fleuri looks both to the past and to the future, and as Laratt-Smith has argued, embodies the artist’s Oedipal deadlock -  an unresolvable struggle between Bourgeois, her father and her mother, stalemated by her mother’s death.

Louise Bourgeois, Cell XXIV (Portrait), 2001, steel, stainless steel, glass, wood and fabric, 177.8 x 106.7 x 106.7 cm. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read. Photo: Christopher Burke. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Bourgeois’ work functions as an expression of her psychic unconscious – a way of giving form to anxieties she could not articulate, which she then subsequently analysed in her writings. While Freud focused on ‘the word’ – translating thoughts and dreams into articulations – Bourgeois moved freely between the two. Her writings reveal struggles, at times debilitating, to define herself within the roles of mother, daughter, wife and artist. And works like Cell XXIV (Portrait), embody this struggle. With three heads and three mirrors, Cell XXIV presents a multiplious identity further broken down by its external reflections – the kind of fragmented view of the self that Bourgeois struggled with throughout her life.

But it is this struggle, and her torment, that fueled her work. This Bourgeois understood well. Speaking specifically about Freud, Bourgeois wrote:

‘The truth is that Freud did nothing for artists, or for the artist’s problem, the artist’s torment - to be an artist involves some suffering. That’s why artists repeat themselves – because they have no access to a cure … the need of artists remains unsatisfied, as does their torment.’

While Bourgeois embraced Freudian psychoanalysis, she was aware of its limitations for herself as an artist. Her writings were not an attempt to cure herself or ease her suffering, but were rather used as fuel for the fire. And it is here, with Freud and Bourgeois under the same roof, that we find ourselves immersed in the realm of a very dangerous obsession.

Installation view of Back to the Things Themselves (Lesley Punton & Judy Spark). Image courtesy of Lesley Punton.

Back to the Things Themselves, on show at The Briggait, presents artworks by Lesley Punton (LP) and Judy Spark (JS) who both explore possibilities and limits of translating one’s lived experience of the environment, and the potential for connections between a subjective experience with universal ways of knowing the world.

Magdalen Chua (MC) had a conversation with Punton and Spark, as a second part of a feature on exhibitions presented during the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art that place emphasis on the process of collaboration and the subjective experience within artistic practice.

Judy Spark, Like punctuation (symphoricarphos), Graphite on paper, 2012, (with Lesley Punton White out receding – Carn Dearg to right). Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: Shall we start off by talking about your individual practices?

LP: My work has always been concerned with landscape issues. In recent years, through the process of walking, it has become more explicit in relation to my lived experience of places that are usually wild and rarely urban. In the exhibition, I have tried to create a diverse conversation between different pieces of work, exploring the limits of experience; and polarities – of night and day, light and dark, and time and duration.

Lesley Punton, Schiehallion, silver gelatin 5 x 4 contact print made after placing a pinhole camera in the summit cairn, pointing South, whilst bivying on the summit of Schiehallion to record the duration of the hours of darkness of midsummer night ’09, 2009-12, with Jim Hamlyn. Image courtesy of artist.

In the past, a lot of the lived experience of my work resulted in long and complicated processes of making. There are works that are directly durational in their actual making, such as Flurry, which marks time. A participatory work is Schiehallion where Jim Hamlyn and I made a pinhole photograph that recorded the duration of midsummer’s night that year at the summit of the mountain. These have a very direct relationship to experiences whilst actually in land. Recent works respond more to reflection and recollections of those experiences. Some have literary connections. Gravesend is the place where the narration of ‘Heart of Darkness’ starts, with Marlowe sitting and recounting the tale of his experience with Kurtz up the Congo.

Lesley Punton, Gravesend, graphite on paper, 2010. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: Could you talk about the Duration pieces? They make me think of a journey, where the days refer to the duration, or the process of making the work.

LP: The duration refers to polar night and polar day and the idea of time as something that is not quite fixed. I’ve always been interested in aspects of time – deep time and geological time – probably from the experience of spending a lot of time in hills.

Lesley Punton, Duration 2, oil & gesso on board, 2010-12 (photo credit L Punton). Image courtesy of artist.

MC: When did you start looking at the idea of the lived experience and venturing into remote places?

LP: I’ve always believed that you would make something that has some relationship to how you connect with the world. The intensity of the experience of walking and climbing mountains was something important and I became a bit obsessed with it. It felt unnatural not to do something with it.

Judy Spark, The things themselves, Two FM radios / transmitters with digital soundtracks, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: My route to making work about lived experience was through a concern with mechanisms like environmentalism that are established to get people to recognize the value of their surroundings. Environmentalism of any kind – whether related to ecology, renewable energies etc., – depends upon the scientific mechanisms that have created the problems that we’re facing in the first place. In the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve begun trying to find ways to think about how people engage with their surroundings. Conversely to Lesley, my landscapes might be right under my feet. It tends to be urban because that’s the environment I’m treading on all the time, and that’s how things come to consciousness.

MC: Could you explain the basis of your philosophical approach. It seems to be about being within a certain environment, perceiving what is around you, and letting these surface.

Judy Spark, Instructions for creating a gap, Printed text, 2011 – 12. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: A big influence was a Master’s in Environmental Philosophy in 2006 which broadened my thinking. There doesn’t seem to be much between the poles of not really caring about the place that you inhabit, and having a code of rules that are scientifically directed on how you should behave. We’re not used to working out anything in-between that is more personal. Trying to find a subjective response to things might actually turn out to have wider relevance than “just my own personal subjective response”. I became interested in the phenomenology movement and the idea of trying to describe actions or processes in a way that allows people to find something more direct and new. I think there are parallels with more indigenous or Buddhist experiences of the world which I can’t be a part of. I’d love to be, but I would only be putting my own Western perception onto them.

Judy Spark, Listening in the gap, Bound, printed text. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: I had a conversation with Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison, and we spoke about the subjective experience and values. When there is an objective framework such as environmentalism, it is easy to subscribe to it because it is clear what kind of values there are. When we move to the subjective, it opens the question of whether there are still values within this realm.

LP: As much as I might prioritise a lived experience and the subjective, my relationship with the audience is more objective. I’m always looking for a distancing mechanism. The act of translation in the artwork gives the potential for objectivity or a poetics of space, which the viewer could enter into with their own subjective experience. If I thought for one second that what I was making was self-indulgent work, I would run for the hills, literally. At the same time I have no interest in creating distanced work. While my work might be incredibly minimal, I hope that there is a poetic layer that subverts that sparseness.

JS: The notion of value is an interesting one because of the distancing that you talk about. I know that I have a bit of a drum to bang in some way, but I can’t use my artwork for that and I wouldn’t want to try. It really is about putting something out there and if it allows viewers to think about their own response to things, then great.

Lesley Punton, Flurry, silverpoint & gesso on paper, 2008. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: How did you meet and what led you to decide to collaborate on this exhibition.

LP: A mutual friend was planning on hillwalking in 2004 and we started regular weekend walks.

JS: We did talk about the possibility of showing work together for years and have had many conversations. When we secured the show, I became very busy. Lesley has a young son and we both work. The collaborative aspect probably starts now in the debriefing of what we’ve done.

LP: As we have individual practices, it was probably important that we had our time to make our own work.

JS: Now that we have put our work in proximity like this, maybe this is the beginning of the next stage

LP: Walking is a very interesting way to collaborate and to build friendships. There are extended periods of silence and these are different from the conversations you have when you meet somebody in the pub. You actively experience something together. I have made some works where I have collaborated with Jim Hamlyn, my partner. The notion of collaboration is still quite new for me in the actual making of artworks together. Up until very recently I’ve not formally collaborated.

Judy Spark, Orrery (gallium aparine), Graphite on paper, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: I’m usually a very isolated practitioner. I teach in an art school and that’s maybe where I get a lot of my energy. Collaboration is something I haven’t made a decision not to do. It seems to be closely connected to that thing of value. Maybe if I meet another artist whose work or practice, or something they say to me about my work or practice, chimes in a way. Maybe it’s to do with being a friend first.

LP:  I think collaborations grow organically. I don’t think you can just put two people together and say collaborate, do it now. It doesn’t work that way.

MC: Perhaps you need a lot of trust. It starts off from conversations and knowing that those conversations can take place even without the art.

LP: …and equality as well. If there’s an imbalance there, I don’t think you can collaborate, and that’s where your idea of trust comes in.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

The revamped Museum of Contemporary Art Australia opened its doors with Marking Time, an exhibition exploring time, duration and mortality.

Jim Campbell’s ‘Last Day in the Beginning of March 2003’, a reimagining of the last 24 hours in his brother’s life, is a transfixing experience. One enters the dark space into the sound of rain.  Pools of flickering light illuminate wall texts identifying single moments such as the slamming of a car door, windshield wipers, the sound of a car radio, the lighting of a cigarette. Apparently random, banal – even meaningless, until they are connected by other texts identifying moments of nausea, anxiety, and the monitoring of medication levels to become a compelling, mysterious narrative. Lights rhythmically dim and brighten, suggesting the ways that memories of traumatic events blur over time, becoming disconnected and fragmentary.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s ‘Death Clock’ is chilling. 10,000 participants entered personal information in a ‘contract’ with the artist, nominating a time to die which activated their own ‘death clock’, an online countdown of their remaining seconds. 500 still images and 3 screens show the inexorable progression of each human life towards the inevitable. Like a 17^th century Vanitas, this work forces each viewer to confront their own mortality.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 2011 - 2012, 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

Katie Paterson worked with Osram to develop a unique bulb that emits light identical to a full moon. Consisting of 288 halogen lightbulbs with frosted, coloured shells, simulating the colour of the moon’s glow, and a single hanging lit bulb, ‘Light Bulb to Simulate the Moonlight’ is evocative rather than confrontational. If each bulb burned out one by one they would last for 66 years, the average human lifespan when Paterson made the work in 2008. Daniel Crook’s ‘time-slice’ video work ‘Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement)’ starts with an elderly man performing morning Tai Chi in a Shanghai park, and develops into an alternate reality where physical matter dissolves into a viscous digital abstraction. Time is stretched like toffee and the laws of physics appear entirely mutable.

Lindy Lee’s ‘weather drawings’ are suspended scrolls which have been exposed to fire and water. Works such as ‘Conflagrations from the End of Time’ reference the teachings of Buddhist masters who likened the universe to an infinite net. In some works intricate patterns are created by holes burned in the paper with a soldering iron, casting lacy shadows on the wall behind them. They are suggestive of the movement of constellations across night skies and the passage of rain and wind. Burnt and stained surfaces reveal the processes of their creation – Lee leaves her scrolls of paper outside in the rain and the sun allowing time and natural phenomena to make their marks.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time', 2011, paper, fire, Chinese ink, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

In similar vein, Rivane Neuenschwander‘s ‘Continente – Nueven – Continent – Cloud’ consists of a false ceiling, lit from above, containing small fans and thousands of tiny white Styrofoam balls. Activated by timers, the fans blow the balls around the ceiling in great drifting clouds.  Audiences are invited to lie on the floor watching the slow movement which at times evokes ink dissolving into watercolour paper, or the movement of leaves or grasses in the wind,  suggesting the ephemerality and fragility of both the world we inhabit and ourselves.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time' (detail) 2011, paper, fire, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

David Shrigley, How are you feeling today? (2012), billboard, 25 x 75 feet, courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery

Running alongside Tenth Avenue for approximately twenty blocks in Chelsea, The High Line has become a household term amongst Manhattanites since 2009 when it first became accessible as a public park. Since then – and especially within the last year – The High Line has ignited widespread murmur relating to its breathtaking architecture, imaginative urban integration and more recently its emergence as the local gallery district’s – if not New York’s – most imaginative sites for exhibiting contemporary art.  Opening April 19^th was The High Line’s first ever group exhibition entitled Lilliput which included the works of Oliver Laric, Alessandro Pessoli, Tomoaki Suzuki, Francis Upritchard, Erika Verzutti and Allyson Vieira. Alongside this exhibition, Uri Aran’s sound installation opened on the same day only then to be followed by Alison Knowles’ public performance Make a Salad on the 22^nd. David Shrigley’s How are you feeling? (2012), presented as a giant billboard over West 18^th Street, and Sturtevant’s Warhol Empire State (2012), a video projection that starts at dusk of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) video, debuted earlier in the month to launch the Friends of the High Line’s 2012 Spring Art Program and High Line Commissions program for public art. The openings this month, surpassing the previous years in numbers of art pieces alone, has proven that this year’s arts program is making a vigorous effort to present art to the public with a bang.

Sturtevant, Warhol Empire State (2012), video projection, image courtesy of the artist

The High Line as we know it today exists upon the skeleton of a freight line that once was the manifestation of a public-private project called the West Side Improvement during the 1930s. However, that was the date that the freight lines were lofted 30 feet above street level after having existed as street-level railroad tracks some odd eighty years prior. During this time, The City and State of New York agreed to take on this massive industrial project due to the fact that Tenth Avenue became known as Death Avenue, a nickname indicative of the innumerable deaths caused between street traffic and the railroad. This was no small project, not least of all financially as it was quoted to be a $150 million dollar expenditure then, and that’s more than $2 billion dollars today.

Building the high line, November 20th 1932. Image courtesy of www.thehighline.org

Trains of food freight and both manufactured and raw goods ran until 1980 at which point the ensuing minimization of the railroad became obsolete due to redundancy and the upsurge of trucking transport. In the face of threatening demolition, Friends of the High Line was established in 1999 as a non-profit by Joshua David and Robert Hammond to preserve the historical lineage and neighborhood aura that the High Line had solidified. An all-star architectural and landscape design team made up of James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (along with a large selection of horticulturists, gardeners, etc) was chosen in 2004 and by June 9^th 2009 the first section (Gansevoort Street to West 20^th Street) of The High Line as a public park opens, with the second section (West 20^th Street to West 30^th Street) to follow in 2011.

Allyson Vieira, Construction (Rampart) (2010), Bronze, 14 x 14 x 18.5 inches, courtesy of Laurel Gitlen Gallery, New York

Since 2009, The High Line has become known as a trendy jaunt-spot in Chelsea where the ultimate people-watching activities and pleasure strolling can be had. This year the public will see the launch of a program called High Line Commissions with the opening of the first ever group exhibition Lilliput to be held on The High Line. This exhibition will present the works of six artists working internationally with, as the title would suggest, small sculptures placed along The High Line’s pathway. This title is taken from Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels in which the imaginary country of Lilliput is home to gnome-sized people no bigger than six inches. The various diminutive sculptures are set within the various niches of landscape along the park walk and offer a sort of Easter-egg hunt of sorts, inviting the public to uncover the various works of art.

Pieces such as Allyson Vieira’s Construction (Rampart) (2012) respond to the local vegetation and ecology of the area with her pyramid of bronze cast paper cups that fill with rain or fallen leaves from the garden bed above. Other works such as The Seduction (2012) by Francis Upritchard are less so adapted for the localized flora but speak to the Lilliputian theme of fairyland idols with two miniature-sized apes frozen in an explorative embrace. Also apart of this spring’s High Line Commissions is Uri Aran’s sound installation Untitled (Good & Bad) (2012) provides a spoken list of arbitrarily categorized animals into “good” or “bad” that billows from gardens below. Coming in May, a much anticipated installation of Thomas Houseago’s sculpture Lying Figure will be on view under The Standard.

Francis Upritchard, The Seduction (2012), Bronze, 18 x 9 x 8 inches, Courtesy of Kate MacGarry, London

Friends of the High Line have initiated other programs such as the High Line Performances, High Line Billboard and High Line Channel that serve as varying avenues whereby art mediums can be exhibited. Opening on April 5^th, David Shrigley’s 25-by-75 foot billboard How are you feeling? presents a short dialogue in black and white speech bubbles, hovering over a parking lot at West 18^th Street. Shrigley’s dry and melancholy humor severs the socially fabricated fluff in monotonous conversation and pinpoints exactly what we all may be feeling but are too nervous to say: “I’m feeling very unstable and insecure […] I am in a bit of a rut creatively as well”.

This year’s itinerary for the High Line Performances will include performances by three female artists (Alison Knowles, Channa Horwitz and Simone Forti) on and around the High Line, the first of which was preformed last Sunday April 22^nd by Alison Knowles’ Fluxus score Make a Salad. Originally performed in Baltimore, Maryland in 1962 has been performed several times around the world and includes the preparation of a salad for a large group of people. Launching the High Line Performances program, Knowles’ piece included the preparation of locally sourced salad ingredients tossed from the upper level to the lower level of the walkway and then served to the public. Though it was a rather cold and rainy day, otherwise unpleasant to be frolicking out of doors to eat a salad, the performance was lively and ignited a grouping of people of all ages in an appropriately themed Earth Day get-together.

Alison Knowles, Make a Salad (1962–present), Image: Tate Modern, London (2008)

I have to applaud the work and organizational efforts of the Friends of the High Line for their inception of the public art programs, and not to mention their unmentioned but as equally remarkable endeavors in the realms of music and food. The High Line as a public park has provided the support for not only a exceptional pleasure destination, but also a cutting-edge platform for contemporary art. I am always fascinated with the seemingly pervasive dialogue relating to the inaccessibility of contemporary art and thus I have always been an advocate for the commissioning of public art. Public art, as inconspicuous or ostentatious it may be, has the power to engage a public (a cross section in a vast demographic) who may not otherwise seek out an interactive relationship with art. Pieces such as the ones mentioned above all own that quality of engagement: the characteristic of calling forth a questioning, a reflection or even a happenstance double take, and sometimes that’s all an art piece needs to fulfill its role in the social sphere.

Please visit  www.thehighline.org/art for a schedule of past, current and upcoming exhibitions and performances on The High Line and additional information on artists. Please visit the site for further information regarding The High Line’s events, public programs, memberships and history.

James Lee Byars, "La figura de la pregunta," 1986.

Unless you really take Lent seriously, and I don’t know many Protestants who do, Easter is a quick event. It’s especially so if you consider all it encompasses: betrayal on Thursday, death on Friday, mourning on Saturday, new life on Sunday. To condense all this into one weekend feels very Christian. We’re fixated on efficiency and the finite. The world is 6,000 years old and the rapture will probably come soon.

The Easter service I attended this April started at 6:30, but should have started earlier. “Pretend it’s still dark out,” said the pastor before asking the music leader to light the logs in the fire pit. “Someone more coordinated should do this,” said the music minister, passing the matches on to a young man in a windbreaker. It was an outdoor service, held in the backyard of a Presbyterian cathedral on Wilshire Boulevard, and they must have known not many would come out so early, because the nomadic, participatory itinerary would have been unwieldy with many more. We’d progress from one station to another, starting at a fire pit like the one the disciple Peter must have sat at when he infamously denied the newly condemned Christ: “I don’t know him.” In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s version, Mary Magdalene, the prostitute Jesus mentored, calls him out: “Peter, don’t you see what you have done, you’ve gone and cut him dead?” “I had to do it, don’t you see,” Peter replies, his singing voice whiny and fearful, “or else they’d come for me.”

Our fire pit must have already burned out all traces of denial, because we used it to light the big Paschal candle (“So much wax,” said the girl next to me), a stand-in for Christ as light of the world. Then, from the Paschal candle, we lit little candles for each of us to hold. We proceeded over to a wooden cross leaning against the easternmost fence. Someone had thought to wrap fishing wire around this cross, and we took turns sticking lilies through the wire after the gospel reading. Some of us tried to slide flowers through with candles still in hand, and hot wax dripped on our fingers.

We moved finally to the baptismal station, where more gospel was read and the Paschal candle officially baptized, bottom down so as not to put out the light of the world. Then we all baptized our small candles in the same manner, and put holy water on each other’s foreheads, saying “may you have new life” while making the sign of the cross with our fingers. A few of these rituals had roots in something traditional; others were likely invented that morning.

James Lee Byars taking questions on TV in Brussells, 1969.

The James Lee Byars exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Hollywood opened on Easter, which seems appropriate. Byars, a nomadic artist who lived in L.A., Germany, Japan, Egypt, and elsewhere understood sacredness as powerful. During Lent in1995, two years before his death, he installed The White Mass in the Church of St. Peter in Cologne. It consisted of a white ring right in the middle of the altar and then four marble pillars with signs inscribed on them: Q.R., I.P., O.Q., Q.D. Each set of letters stood in for a tenet of Byars’ Philosophy of Questioning, a belief system that really did just center on the conviction that questions — not answers — were all we humans had to push us onward. Q.R. meant “The Figure of the Question is in the Room” while O.Q. referred to “The Figure of the One Question.” No one could enter the installation unless they were participating in the mass.

James Lee Byars, "The Chair for the Philosophy of Question," 1996. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

At Overduin and Kite, a collection of marble “books” shaped like sun and stars and encased in glass are like relics from some tasteful, medieval cult. In the adjoining room, a gold nail hammered into the wall recalls the crucifixion, and the Chair of the Philosophy of Questioning is installed inside a red silk tent. It’s not clear what one would do if sitting in that ornate chair; I suppose one would preside over the question-asking of anyone who ventured into the tent. “Basically I try to solve essential questions with questions,” Byars once said. But that makes his questioning feel particularly ritualistic; he’s living out his religion by refusing to ever answer.

Nina Katchadourian, "Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #18-19," 2011. C-print. Edition of 8. Diptych: 7.157 x 6 inches each.

The thing about traveling on an airplane is that we take for granted how phenomenally absurd it is. There we sit, unfazed, hurdling through space at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal tube, surrounded by complete strangers whom in all likelihood we will never see again. There is also the unspoken airplane etiquette that we all hope the stranger sitting next to us will follow: please don’t talk, don’t move, don’t get up…basically please do everything you can to appear as though you don’t exist. With these restrictions, an airplane in flight is a very difficult place to do anything more than sleep, read, stare out the window or watch movies with only the most watered-down content. Unless you are Nina Katchadourian.

For Seat Assignment, her fifth solo show at Catherine Clark Gallery, Katchadourian culled from a body of work made on more than seventy flights over the past two years. Now, artists reading this might be terrified by having their workspace confined to the miniscule square-footage of an airline seat and the plane’s lavatory. For Katchadourian, it is a pragmatic opportunity to bring her “studio” with her. Using only her camera phone and the materials at hand, she creates everything from improvised classical Flemish self-portraits to miniature composed landscapes and worlds.

Nina Katchadourian. Excerpt from the Extreme Sports series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

As its title suggests, the series Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style uses objects such as inflatable neck pillows, napkins, bits of plastic and whatever else Katchadourian has on hand to make self-portraits in the style of classical Flemish paintings. Window Seat Suprematism references the fundamental geometric forms of the early 20th-century Russian movement. The images in the series, taken of the planes’ wings through the window, create compelling minimalist, geometric compositions that even Malevich could approve of.

Nina Katchadourian, "Meteor," from the Disasters series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

In-flight magazines supply some of the most fruitful material. One work from Landscapes uses black sweater lint to turn a snow-covered mountain into a smoldering volcano. In Disasters, pretzel crumbs become a devastating landslide off mountain road. Black lint makes another appearance, with the addition of other various detritus, in Birds of New Zealand, adorning the heads and bodies of exotic birds and giving them an even more elaborate flare. The strangest thing about these images is how believable the compositions are. While it may be obvious that the pretzels on the road are indeed pretzels and not rocks, or that a bird does not have a cashew shaped appendage on its head in real life, the objects give a genuine moment of pause, plus the feeling that while absurd, it could be real.

Nina Katchadourian, "Wigeon" from the Birds of New Zealand series, 2011. From the Seat Assignment series.

Katchadourian views a situation that most of us find claustrophobic, boring and tedious as a challenge to highlight both the fantastic and mundane aspects of air travel. The sense of humor and improvisational genius that make up Seat Assignment exemplify an artist setting certain parameters for herself and successfully working within them to create work that is both complex and light hearted.

Seat Assignment will be on view at Catherine Clark Gallery until May 26, 2012.

Alice Shaw. "Gum Print," 2012; archival pigment print, 20.5 x 28.5 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

The profusion of works and materials in Alice Shaw’s Landscape Update at Gallery 16 leaves viewers with the impression of a frenzy. The twenty-six works on view are made from an exhaustive array of media: paintings of oil and dye on linen; sculptures of cast bronze and concrete; photographs, including pigment, Van Dyke brown, and gelatin silver prints; and drawings or hybrid works of charcoal, ink, and gold leaf. Though the artist’s goal of exploring the landscape through various methods and materials is admirable, the effect is less comprehensive than it is schizophrenic. There are moments when Shaw’s depictions of a natural world sullied by human presence do shine, but overall the exhibition could have been improved by the notion that less is more.

Despite the show being weakened by the surfeit of approaches, there are many works that are intriguing and funny. Gum Print (2012) is a close-up, black-and-white photograph of a tree trunk that nearly blocks the view of the wild valley and pine-studded ridge beyond. The proximity of the trunk provides rich details of the rugged bark, showing bits of moss and an old bent nail stuck amongst its crevices; the image is so crisply captured that a viewer can almost feel the rough textures. However, the print is contaminated by a wad of actual chewing gum stuck nonchalantly to the center of the trunk: a rose-pink blot of detritus that undercuts the serenity of the scene. The wad is in a rounded, larval shape that could be an organic part of this natural scene if it weren’t for its man-made color. From an oblique angle, a viewer can see threads of sticky pink residue that stretch from the print to the inner surface of the framing glass—the same way that trodden gum stretches from the urban pavement to one’s shoe. For Shaw, no pristine vista will remain untouched by human carelessness.

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Luxury Logico Artist Collective (Taipei, Taiwan), ‘Solar’, 2010, lights, computer, sound, courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Down the Rabbit Hole, the current exhibition in Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, explores familiar themes, such as the disjunction between appearance and reality, or between the real and the fake. Layers of the past and present, preoccupying so many artists, provide insights into the psychological whirlwind resulting from the pace of change in today’s China. Ideas about materialism, globalisation, wealth and power, corruption, and identity confusion are evident in many works.

Wang Luyan’s ‘Breathe Series – ATM’ appears to be a real cash dispenser, until you realise its soft silicone rubber surface moves gently as if breathing in and out. Wang’s earlier work, ‘Breathe – Manager Zhao’s Black Cab’ is a dusty battered van with one working headlight, its dented sides expanding with each breath. A homage to the entrepreneurial spirit of ordinary people making their way through the changed universe of post-Mao China? Or an ominous warning about the relationships between human and machine? His machines are not shiny high-tech objects, however, but imperfect, slightly flabby, soft and squishy, much like humans themselves.

Wang Luyan, ‘Breathe Series - ATM’ 2011, silicone, steel and motor, image courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Taiwanese artists in this show include the tech-savvy members of the Luxury Logico collective, whose installation ‘Solar,’ created from old lamps, evokes a mood at once nostalgic and futuristic, reminding me irresistibly of ET phoning home. Tu Wei-Cheng’s ‘Bu Num Civilisation Revealed’ simulates the archaeological discovery of an ancient civilisation, a ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ style temple and its artefacts, whose elaborate ‘stone’ wall carvings turn out on closer inspection to be computer keyboards, iPhones and brand logos.

Wang Duo’s “Old Brands Made New’ features the artist as a 1930’s Shanghai seductress in ‘posters’ which initially appear to be traditional advertisements. Then we realise that the featured cigarettes are Marlboro, the beauty products are Chanel, and the handbags are Prada and Louis Vuitton. The advertisements themselves are video installations which make us question how we interpret what we see. Shanghai’s short lived early 20^th century modernity and sophistication are evoked in a way which queries the fate of today’s modernity, our reliance on technology and the obsessive quest after wealth and conspicuous consumption.

Wang Duo, ‘Old Brands Made New’ No 7, 2011, video installation, image courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Fung Ming Chip reinvents traditions of calligraphy and ink-painting. His sand script is written with a brush dipped in water, and then filled with gusts of dried, powdered ink which adheres to some of the still-wet strokes of his brush. Like Xu Bing, he is interested in the connections between calligraphy, language and meaning, and like Xu Bing he challenges our assumptions about what we are seeing and ‘reading’. ‘Departure’ is a meditation on air travel, and references sacred sutra scrolls as well as the traditions of the literati. It reads ’36,000 feet up and 763 kilometres per hour’ – a ‘floating world’ indeed.

Down the Rabbit Hole presents a world much like Alice’s, where appearances can be deceiving and meaning is subject to change.

Who’s Bad?, 2012, single-channel video, 10:44 (looped).

Alan and Michael Fleming come to play in their show GAME ON at Chicago’s threewalls gallery. Working as a collaborative team, the identical twin brothers frame their practice within their genetic and fraternal relationship in order to create a variety of thought provoking gestures about similarity and difference, friendship, and the creative potential of games.

Many of the pieces in the show were created during a yearlong separation in which the brothers, while spending 2011 living in different cities – Alan in Brooklyn and Michael in Chicago – used their time apart as a springboard for a series of conceptual projects. Psychic Color Calendars (2011), for example, tests the twins’ long-range telepathic abilities. For each day in January, the Flemings would try to think of the same color, red, blue, yellow, black, or white, and record the results on their respective calendars. Out of thirty-one days, they were successful only three times. The results were predictable, but enjoyable nonetheless in that they reveal the creative options available when success is an impossibility.

Throughout the show, simple instructions, like the rules to a game, create spaces for variation and play. In a series titled Correspondence (2011), the artists mailed each other absurd instructions written on tourist postcards featuring their respective cities. One postcard reads, “Move an object that is bigger than your body.” The object chosen was a dumpster, documented slightly askew in a Polaroid snapshot accompanying the postcard. The instructions are all fairly simple and silly, like the challenges children might pose to one another, testing the bravery and creativity of a surrogate body.

Rock Paper Scissors, 2011, hydrocal, 3" x 36" x 20".

The mail also factors into a piece titled A Sea Shanty (2011), which consists of a six inch cubed cardboard box that the brothers mailed back and forth to each other throughout the year they were apart. Like a long range game of catch, the act of sending and resending the package provided the artists with a simple ritual capable of fortifying their relationship. Fittingly, the box was empty; a true gift in the sense that it was the gesture of sending something and the consideration for one another that was the purpose behind the package. The object itself could act as a substitute visitor when Alan and Michael were unable to make the journey to meet one another, the meaning of the box developing out of a shared sense of longing.

The poignancy of the brothers’ connection is further illustrated in Conjoined Chairs (2011). Here, each artist set out on the same day to purchase a chair at a thrift store in his respective neighborhood. The chairs were then cut in half down the middle and reassembled to create two new chairs that mirror one another. There is something tender about the way the chairs suggest comity within the nature of the brothers’ identities; that half of one is contained within the structure of the other and vice versa. The chairs also serve as an allegory of artistic partnership as the suturing together of ideas.

United again in Brooklyn, where the artists now live, the Flemings created a second body of work for the show utilizing strategies from the 2011 projects. Like Psychic Color Calendars, the video Psychic Color Pour (2012) employs chance and a limited color scheme in a new game of telepathy. In the piece, each brother takes a turn sitting in a chair trying to guess the color of six buckets of paint held above him one at a time by the other brother. Answer correctly and the paint is set aside. Answer incorrectly and the paint comes showering down. Consequence and reward, trust, and just a hint of malice are inserted into the Flemings’ themes of play, collaboration, and impossible expectations.

Installation View.

Physical abilities are also tested and measured. A video piece titled Who’s Bad? (2012) features the artists attempting to perform a dance sequence from Michael Jackson’s music video “Bad” on the same Brooklyn subway platform where Martin Scorsese directed the original. Mimicking the internal process of becoming a trained dancer, Alan, who has studied hip-hop and break dancing for several years, coaches his untrained brother Michael through the series of movements. While Alan moves through the choreography with confidence and obvious skill, Michael appears hesitant and is always just a step behind, revealing the distance between the twins’ physical abilities.

The dance steps in Who’s Bad, like the simple instructions and systems used in projects throughout the show, are similar to the ways in which children’s games rely on rules to create spaces of imagination and play. In the spirit of cooperation, the artists rarely push these spaces to dangerous, destructive, or malicious places. Instead, a sense of camaraderie and friendship pervades the show, offering a catalogue of what is possible between two artists generously open to pursuing each other’s creative impulses.

GAME ON is on view at threewalls in Chicago through April 21, 2012.

Sophie T. Lvoff & Nathan T. Martin, "Untitled (Primary)", 2012. Archival pigment print on newsprint. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Sophie T. Lvoff.

One of the most informative moments in SPACES, the latest exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, is a timeline of the birth of the St. Claude art scene handwritten in black charcoal pencil on the wall.

Born out of the reinvigoration of community action in post-Katrina New Orleans, bolstered by the adrenaline shot of Prospect.1, hard working artist collectives popped up across the city in 2008, including Press Street’s Antenna Gallery, Good Children, and The Front, which aggressively show many artists from the St. Claude District. While worlds of change have occurred in the microcosm of New Orleans in the last half-decade, the genuine and honest dedication to making and showing art by these three cooperatives has remained the same.  That is why SPACES, an exhibition bringing the work of these three collectives together under one roof, is disappointing; not for the art but for the lack of curatorial inspiration that should have highlighted this positivity.

SPACES showing Dave Greber "The Front on Display", 2012; Chris Saucedo "Pencil King", 1996 and Lala Raščić in cooperation with Sophie T. Lvoff "Posing Process", 2012. Courtesy the Contemporary Arts Center, Photo: Angela Berry.

While there is a boot-strap spirit to each of these organizations, they operate with very distinct tones. This highlights the first part of the problem with this exhibition: there is no clarity of form within the show.  Artists from each organization are scattered around the room, lacking a clear tone to unite the work. The exhibition brings together disparate conversations that are often at odds with each other.  For example, Sophie Lvoff and Nate T. Martin’s Untitled (Primary) is a lush archival pigment print of a purple tavern at dusk. Sophie Lvoff’s photograph speaks to the vibrancy of early American color photography through lens of New Orleans surfaces. Writer Nate T. Martin adds a short vignette that sketches a child’s perception of driving in a rental car with her father and waiting outside a bar. The combination of text and image paints a visceral picture of innocence and vulnerability in a mundane world. Lvoff and Nathan’s work is located next to Ryan Watkins-Hughes cynical installation See St. Claude. Audiences of the show are prompted to step up to the photo, snap a shot of themselves photo booth style and email the photo to see-stclaude.tumblr.com.  At this site the artist writes: “The See St. Claude photo booth allows gallery visitors to see the St. Claude arts District from the comforts and safety of the CAC.”  This satirical approach to bringing art lovers to St. Claude directly references the insulation of certain neighborhoods in the city. The combination of the work of Watkins-Hughes and Lvoff and Nathan is certainly thought provoking, but leaves the viewer in the uncertain position of attempting to connect these two very disparate attitudes.

SPACES, showing Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S.), "Monopoly (St. Claude Ave.)", 2012. Courtesy the Artist and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery. Photo: Angela Berry.

Using a 1969 exhibition curated by Jennifer Licht at the Museum of Modern Art as the model for this exhibition, the space is developed around innovative approaches to interacting with museum space. Licht described this show as “an exhibition in which the installation becomes the actual realization of the work of art and rooms must be planned and built according to the artists’ needs, challenging the usual role of the museum.” This may be the stated intention of SPACES, however, many of the works are plopped into the CAC’s space, rather than the gallery being formatted to fit the work. Case in point, only three of the over forty artists were asked to actually make site-specific installations; Rachel Avena Brown, Bob Snead, and Jonathan Traviesa. Brown’s installation is a collaboration with Antenna Gallery artist James Goedert.  D-Cern Space brings together stop motion animation and knitted yarn.  On a large tv monitor an animation of the floor plans of each participating gallery are brought together and torn apart. Knit green squares form patterns around the tv monitor, insinuating the shape of the Large Hadron Collider.  Brown and Goedert seek to define a new space, one in which these galleries work more closely in tandem. D-Cern Space suggests what this exhibition could have been if each artist included in this show had the opportunity to install a thoughtfully prepared work.

Rachel Avena Brown & James W. Goedert "D-CERN space", 2012. Acrylic house paint, copper wire, digital stop motion, yarn. Courtesy the Artists. Photo: Angela Berry

Dave Greber’s three channel video installation The Front on Display is a wiseass satire on the perception of the artist as a rock star. All the members of The Front trade quips on this video reel of a photo shoot. Teenage boy-bandesque statements are made such as, “that’s when people are really at their best- when they are making posters” and “I’ve got some stuff to say, and it’s really important.” The sarcasm drips from the tv screen onto the floor, unfortunately drowning out other works.  Any other surrounding pieces that aren’t 100% aggressive, such as Jerald L. White’s photographs, are easily overlooked.

The cultural history of New Orleans is by nature a collective one. The galleries represented in this show come out of the tradition of working within neighborhoods to achieve goals that bureaucratic inadequacies are unable to accomplish. Antenna Gallery, The Front, and Good Children Gallery have all leveraged the resources of their members in order to build a community around visual art. CAC’s curatorial job does this achievement a disservice by creating discordant tones. I trust though that these spaces will continue to do what they do best–make visually interesting and thought provoking works.

Werner Herzog, Hearsay of the Soul, 2012. Installation: four channel digital projection of twenty etchings by Hercules Segers; music by Ernst Reijseger. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

This year, the Biennial acts as a platform – or even a forum if you will – for comprehending the expanded fields of contemporary art in relation to performance, film, literary, multi-media and curatorial praxis. Whereas the Biennial in 2010 acted as an acknowledgment of a benchmark – that being the year 2010 – taking its thesis from the roots of retrospection. It looked towards the history of the Whitney Biennial since its inception in 1932, in honoring the structure and legacy of the Biennial, while also commenting on the political and social structures of rehabilitation that were propagated from certain instances such as the presidential election of Barack Obama. Unfortunately – and probably at the fault of an overly expansive thesis – the 2010 Biennial fell flat, quite simply, and was remarkably unmemorable for me. However, the 2012 Biennial this year not only commands more cohesiveness in both content and intention, but its presentation of works from fifty-one artists – a list edited more so than any Biennial to date – granted a substantial significance to the curation as a whole production.

The 2012 Biennial, poignantly dedicated to the late Mike Kelley who passed away earlier this year, presents artists at all points in their careers, in a vast array of media from painting, sculpture, photography, installation, music, theater, film and dance. Not only did curators Sussman and Sanders instigate the notion of the “expanded field of the arts”, but they very much emphasized the connective points between one practice to another, or similarly one profession to another. As quoted in the 2012 Biennial press release, both Sussman and Sanders remarks that, “[…] a number of artists are functioning as researchers and curators, drawing on the histories of art, design, dance, music and technology. Artists are bringing other artists into their work – a form of free collage or reinvention that borrows from the culture at large as a way of rewriting the standard narratives and exposing more relevant hybrids”.

Dawn Kasper, THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT, 2012 (from the series Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment, 2009– ). Three-month durational performance and multimedia installation. Dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the 2012 Biennial is the 6,000-square foot performance arena designed on the fourth floor. Complete with viewing bleachers, this space is dedicated to musical, dance, theatrical (et al.) performances through the end of the Biennial. Performances directed by choreographers such as Michael Clark and Sarah Michelson, as well as various musical acts such as the experimental rock band The Red Krayola and soprano singer Alicia Hall Moran, turn the fourth floor space into a theater of expansive talent, blurring the boundaries between context and vocation.

In relation to the subject of context, Dawn Kasper will transform a back gallery on the third floor into her personal studio and living space, entitled THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT (2012). Reminiscent of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-Ins during the Vietnam War era, albeit not necessarily in activist intent, Kasper speaks about the dichotomy present relating to the immediacy of human connection in an otherwise very intimate space, such as a bedroom or artist’s studio space.

The unparalleled presence of film and thus the artistic dialogue centered within filmic studies is a noteworthy supplement to this year’s Biennial. The film program, co-curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, strives to point out the significant advances in film and video within the past decade in conjunction to those in contemporary art. From short, experimental video pieces such as Hearsay of the Soul (2012) by Werner Herzog and selected works from George Kuchar’s Weather Diaries (1977–2011) series, to lengthier features such as The Oath (2010) by Laura Poitras (who was nominated for an Emmy, an Academy Award and an Independent Spirit Award for her post-9/11 film My Country, My Country (2006)), exemplify the vast conglomeration of video art and film. And what is a Biennial dedicated to Mike Kelley without a substantial serving of Mike Kelley? Three of his films from the series Mobile Homestead (2010–11) present a vignette of Detroit’s civil history as the narrative to his public art project in his hometown. With the film and performance programs initiated this way, viewers can return several times to attend the array of performance acts, which insures an extended interaction with the public, a relationship to whom an institution is always beholden.

SamLewitt, Fluid Employment, 2012. Ferromagnetic liquid poured bi-weekly over plastic, magnetic elements and fans. Dimensions variable. Collection of the artist.

Some of my personal favorites were photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier in her Homebody series (2010) in which she dons her deceased grandfather and grandmother’s personal (and intimate) items, such as pajamas or blankets, in their abandoned apartment as an act of lamentation. Sam Lewitt’s installation entitled Fluid Employment (2012) made from poured ferromagnetic liquid elucidates the medium’s immaculate traits in its imminent usage in electronic devices such as hard drives. The peripheral retrospective curated by artist Robert Gober on Forest Bess (1911–1977) – which, in the very act of his curation, acted as a perfect extension to Gober’s own practice – was astounding in content. Exposing the enigmatic and mentally unstable modern artist Forest Bess, Gober paints a character sketch of Bess by virtue of paintings, extensive wall texts, archival letters (exchanges between his New York dealer Betty Parsons) and photographs. If a large painting of a unicorn didn’t attract me enough, it was certainly the psychosis that manifested itself in hermaphroditic self-mutilations that sealed the deal for me. Installations by Lutz Bacher, Cameron Crawford and Luther Price’s handmade and manipulated film slides are not to be missed either.

Forest Bess (1911-1977), The Noble Carbunkle, 1960. Oil on canvas. 30 x 49 1/2 inches (76.2 x 125.7 cm). Private collection; courtesy of Amy Wolf Fine Art, New York.

Conclusively, the 2012 Whitney Biennial was a concisely edited and masterfully conceptualized project. A well-grounded understanding and use of the various spaces within and around the museum give Sussman and Sanders a virtuosic credit. I am relieved to see that a spotlight has finally been shown on both performance and filmic arts, in all of their realms and sub-categories, especially in a biennial setting. Several members of the Whitney staff exclaim the serendipitous team that Sussman and Sanders made in numerous paragraphs in the press literature and it is clear when experiencing the materialization of their collaboration. This is a biennial that has me delighted in saying that I will return several times. The Whitney Biennial will run from March 1^st through May 27^th. Live  performances, public programs and film screenings will run through the end of May. Refer to whitney.org for more information on events and tickets.

Gabriel Dawe, Plexus 11, 2011, thread, thread installation, Courtesy of the Artist, Sponsored by Gutermann, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

There is a specific joy that flares when a familiar space is reanimated by art—whether it’s public sculpture appearing at a junction travelled through often, like the new fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, or something as quiet as a different postcard image on an office bulletin board—it’s a little visual jolt for a view that’s become tired.

When I first arrived at the Courtauld Institute, I was perpetually lost and in a kind of state of wonder walking up and down the Alice in Wonderland staircases, through the tiny doors and along back corridors. For someone whose schooling was mainly spent in North American institutional blocks designed, it seemed, after prison architecture, this was entirely enchanting. A decade later, the building is no longer an unfolding mystery, but the recently launched East Wing X has harnessed that sense of discovery, filling the college with art, and, at a packed private view a few weeks ago, ebullient revelers.

Heringa/ Van Kalsbeek Untitled, 2010-11, ceramics, resin, steel, cloth, porcelain, Courtesy of the artists, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

This year marks the tenth instalment of the Institute’s East Wing exhibition, a biennial show of contemporary art that invades the school’s stairwells, corridors and seminar rooms. The tradition began two decades ago when Courtauld student Joshua Compston lamented the lack of contemporary art at the Institute and sought permission to mount a small show, including work by Damien Hirst and Gilbert and George. EW has ever since offered a counterbalance to the official collection, across the arched drive on the Strand side of Somerset House, where the more famous Western half of the building houses the renowned Courtauld Gallery, and a response to the progressive research interests of the student body. The comparison is indeed hard to avoid: while the eighteenth century William Chambers architecture makes a greaceful backdrop to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces on one side, it sits in stark, though aluring, contrast to the contemporary installations. Like the Saatchi Gallery’s old County Hall site, the well-matched convergence of old and new can generate a particular brand of site-specific magic.

For twenty years, Courtauld undergraduate students have  taken up the EW gauntlet, passing down the tradition as they matriculate through their Bachelor degrees, and the exhibition has continuously grown in ambition and scale. This year some fifty students have taken on roles as curators, press officers and installers, as well as managing special events, education and sponsorship. It is an impressive collaboration, and the resulting show, including work by over forty artists from Hirst and Howard Hodgkin—nods to the original event and in celebration of this benchmark year—bursts with all that energy and enterprise.

Damien Hirst, Dome (Sanctum), 2009, hand inked photogravure on 400 gsm Velin d’Arches paper, Courtesy of Andipa Gallery, London, Photo: Stephen White, Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.

Arman, Blue Paint Tubes, 1989-90, paint tubes and perspex, Courtesy of Private Collector

This year’s curatorial theme Material Matters: The Power of the Medium is purposefully inclusive, allowing for a breadth of media from more traditional painting and sculpture to large-scale installation pieces, projections, photography and, at the launch event, performance. In the main reception, the show is introduced with Arman’s Blue Paint Tubes where materials and composition coalesce. An apt place to start, the work sits framed and hung high, an overlooking touchstone for the rest of the show, largely more recent and dynamic work. Below,  Kirsty Howe’s yarnbombing intervention kits out the institute’s permanent sculpture as Olympic mascots in swimming costumes.

Kirsty Howe, Knitting for Gold, 2012, Yarnbombing, Courtesy of the Artist, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

There’s too much work to detail all of it here, but highlights for me included both stairwell installations, graceful works falling through narrowly turning spirals. Off the main reception, Shi Jindian’s delicate blue steel wire footsteps are a distraction and a guide for those on their way up the long winding path the lecture theatre. The show’s scene-stealer, though, is Gabriel Dawe’s colourful thread installation in the back, white-washed stairwell, a shape-shifting spectrum of colour, it changes with varying light and points of view, like cascading prisms.

Shi Jindian, Footprints, 2006-2011, steel wiring, Courtesy of Contemporary by Angela Li, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

Gabriel Dawe, Plexus 11, 2011, thread, thread installation, Courtesy of the Artist, Sponsored by Gutermann, Photo: Sara Knelman, 2012.

Tucked away in the quiet corner on the top floor, a section titled Anniversary includes more sombre work that considers the slow passage of time: the material objects that mark it out symbolically, like Enzo Guaricci’s concrete balloons, or physical markers of deterioration under the weight of everyday use, like Rachel Whiteread’s Yellow Edge and Sam Belinfante’s Improvisation with Drumsticks, which look like delicately rendered lunar lanscapes.

Enzo Guaricci, Flying Means, 1998, marble powder, resin and natural colours, Courtesy the artist and Stark Projects

Sam Belinfante, Improvisation with Drumsticks IV, 2008, softground etching on paper, Courtesy of the artist

Downstairs in the zones well-trafficked by students, sparks of lighthearted wit extend moments of respite from long library sessions. Korean artist Shin Meekyong’s Soap Buddha sculptures adorn the otherwise sterile loos—an alternative to the soap dispensers, if the user can bring themselves to rub a bit off these functional icons. And, in the student café, a selection of Slinkachu photographs from the Little People Project  hang in the alcoved seating areas, restaging moments of urban life as miniature monuments, wry reflections on contemporary ambition and desire, a different food for thought.

Meekyoung Shin, Buddha Series, 2012, soap, Courtesy of the artist

Slinkachu, Animals, Lambda c-type print on Foamex, 2011, Courtesy of the Artist and Andipa Gallery, London

Slinkachu, The Last Resort, Lambda c-type print on Foamex, 2011, Courtesy of the Artist and Andipa Gallery, London

Additional work by Stephen Carly, Hugo Dalton, Dirk Dzimirsky, Rohini Devasher, Simon Edmonson, Patrick Hughes, Laura Keeble, Mung Lar Lam, Emi Miyashita, Simon Monk, Erik Sanner and Rupert Shrive, among others. Open days including exhibition tours are held on the last Saturday of every month, check the EWX site for future talks and events as they unroll in coming months.