art basel 2014, issue 3

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TURIN LONDON NEW YORK PARIS ATHENS MOSCOW BEIJING
A RT BASEL DAILY ED ITION 19 JUNE 2014
NIGERIAN ART:
Galleries open
around the country
as interest in the
market grows
ANALYSIS
PAGE 4
WARHOL AND BASELITZ: © DAVID OWENS. LICHTENSTEIN: PHOTO: IAN REEVES; © ESTATE OF ROY LICHTENSTEIN. AFRICA: BEN ENWONWU, PRINCES OF MALI, 1976 (DETAIL). PERFORMANCE: XAVIER LE ROY, “THE RITE OF SPRING”; PHOTO: VINCENT CAVAROC SACRE
TRENDS
Basel. A set of vividly coloured rollers
wrapped in shiny metallic sheeting is
stopping visitors in their tracks at Art
Basel. The work, available with Daniel
Blau (2.0/D3), seems to have come
straight from the studio of Jeff Koons.
But Untitled (Mylar Sculpture I-III), 196970, is actually by the Pop Art master
Andy Warhol, known for his massproduced silkscreens depicting 20thcentury icons and US consumer goods.
Other dealers have also brought
works that reveal a different side to
artists. Munich-based Galerie Thomas
(2.0/F13) is showing a remarkable largescale slate-grey painting by Gerhard
Richter. “When you think of Richter,
colour explosions and broad strokes
come to mind. This work is just about
the grey [paint] and the movement of
the painting itself,” says the gallery’s
director Jörg Paal. Grau (Grey), 1974,
priced at €2.9m, is from the artist’s familiar “Grey Paintings” series—eight of
the works are on show at the Fondation
Beyeler (“Gerhard Richter: Pictures/Series”, until 7 September)—but “they are
rarely seen on the market”, Paal says.
Although dealers tend to take easily
recognisable pieces to art fairs, Art
Basel, with its informed audience and
strong brand, inspires galleries
to show atypical works.
“People coming to Art
Basel expect to see
pieces that challenge and surprise
them. Many visitors have been
coming for more
than 30 years and
have had plenty
of exposure to
Western art,” says
the London-based art
adviser Arianne Levene.
The Norwegian dealer
Eivind Furnesvik (Standard Oslo,
2.1/J5) is showing five lamp sculptures
by Alex Hubbard (“Untitled” series, 2013,
$24,000 each). They are the first works
made in this medium by the Los Angeles-based artist, who is known for his
abstract paintings and videos. Furnesvik
says that “even challenging ‘shelf-warmers’—works that remain in storage for
a long time—tend to sell at Art Basel”.
Even so, such works may have a
smaller audience, says the Londonbased collector Jason Lee. “They appeal
more to institutions; collectors tend to
play it safe.” Art Basel, now in its 45th
edition, has always been a mecca for
JUST DESSERTS:
We get the art
we deserve, says
collector Harald
Falckenberg
INTERVIEW
PAGE 6
CHOREOGRAPHY:
Care to dance?
Museums and
galleries expand
their repertoire
FEATURE
PAGES 9-10
PLUS
PREVIEW
SA
LISTING ND
S
of fair
exhibitio s and
ns in
and bey Basel
ond
Artists retain the
element of surprise
Recognisable names at the fair are not always matched by recognisable works
Grand Palais to
bridge the Gap
It’s Warhol, but not as you know him. Left, Baselitz’s wooden sculpture, another departure from the norm
private collectors as
well as major public
institutions. This
week, representatives
of the Louvre, the Tate,
New York’s Whitney
Museum of American Art
and the Dallas Museum of
Art in Texas are among at least
35 museum groups visiting the fair.
“Art Basel is the only fair where directors, curators and trustees all turn
up together, so they can make much
quicker decisions,” says the dealer Thaddaeus Ropac (2.0/B11)—so galleries bring
more ambitious works. Ropac is showing an enormous wooden sculpture by
the German artist Georg Baselitz (Folk
Thing Zero, 2009, €2.3m). A work of a
similar scale and medium by the artist
has not surfaced on the market for ten
years, Ropac says. “Because they are so
demanding [to produce], Baselitz has
not made many wooden sculptures
over his career.”
Massimiliano Gioni, the associate director of New York’s New Museum, is
among the key curators in attendance
at the fair. He cites wallpaper made by
the late US artist Elaine Sturtevant,
which forms a backdrop to the stand of
New York-based gallery Gavin Brown’s
Enterprise (2.1/P2). Gioni says it was “unexpected” for the artist to work in this
medium (the piece is not for sale).
sculptures on the stand have never
been exhibited before.
Bringing off-beat works to Art Basel
also highlights a pressing issue: the
dwindling supply of sought-after works
by established, and in some cases emerging, artists. “For a good dealer to get
material and keep it fresh from fair to
fair is a challenge,” says the New Yorkbased dealer Edward Tyler Nahem (2.0/F8).
“People coming to Art Basel expect to see pieces
that challenge and surprise them”
Cecilia Alemani, the director of High
Line Art in New York, says that she is
surprised to see a series of sculptures
(“Composition in Space”, 1963, €120,000
each) by the Polish artist Edward Krasinski at Foksal Gallery Foundation (2.1/H9).
Krasinski is generally associated with
his trademark blue Scotch-tape installations, which he began in 1968. Foksal’s
Aleksandra Sciegienna says that the
Most stands are filled with signature
works that meet the demands of the
market—and this seems to be paying
off. Warhol’s Self-Portrait (Fright Wig),
1986, with Skarstedt (2.0/E14), sold for
around $35m, the highest reported sale
at the fair so far. The artist’s gleaming
Mylar sculpture, on the other hand, is
priced at $2m.
Gareth Harris and Julia Michalska
Paris. Major Modern and contemporary
works from the collection of Donald
and Doris Fisher, the founders of the
Gap clothing empire, will be shown in
France next year at Paris’s Grand Palais
(6 April-22 June 2015). The collection
will be seen outside San Francisco for
the first time since it was sent on a
100-year loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2009.
The Fishers began collecting in the
1970s and amassed more than 1,100
works by 185 artists, dating from 1928
to the present day. The couple focused
on artists including Alexander Calder,
Anselm Kiefer, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard
Richter and Andy Warhol. The first
major painting they acquired was Lichtenstein’s Nerts, 1978 (above, Live Ammo
[“Tzing”], 1962, also in the collection).
Quality and depth
Donald Fisher, who died in 2009, joined
the California museum’s board of
trustees in 1983. He was a key contributor to the fundraising campaign for
its Mario Botta-designed building, which
opened in 1995.
Other works from the museum’s
collection will also travel to France.
“The exhibition will offer a preview of
the quality and depth of our collection
of post-war American art,” says a spokeswoman for the US institution.
The museum is currently closed for
a $610m overhaul. The project includes
a new 235,000 sq. ft section designed
by the Norwegian architects Snøhetta,
which is due to open in 2016. Threequarters of the work in the expanded
galleries will be drawn from the Fisher
Collection; the rest will come from the
museum’s permanent collection. G.H.
2
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
NEWS
Art Basel in Miami: business as usual?
New art commissions are part of the renovation plan for the Miami Beach Convention Center
CONSTRUCTION PROJECT
Miami Beach. More than $5m is being
set aside for art commissions in Miami
Beach as part of the renovation of its
convention centre, thanks to a city ordinance requiring that 1.5% of the construction costs, which the Miami Herald
reports to be $500m, go towards the
Art in Public Places (AIPP) fund.
The total contribution is expected
to be between $5m and $7m, with
works due to be placed either throughout the renovated building or on land
around the Miami Beach Convention
Center. Some pieces are expected to
be commissioned for a new green
space next to the main building.
“The remit and size, type or scale
of the art is not yet determined, since
the project is in the early conceptual
stage. The selection process for the
artists has yet to be determined by the
AIPP selection committee,” says Dennis
Leyva, the co-ordinator for the fund.
Impact on the fair
There is still some uncertainty about
how Art Basel in Miami Beach will be
affected by the rebuilding. The Miami
Herald recently reported that Art Basel’s
organisers rejected a proposal by the
city to hold the fair in two halls, rather
than the usual four, during the reconstruction, which is scheduled to begin
in September 2015 and expected to last
for around three years. But a spokeswoman for Art Basel says that it was
never offered two halls.
“We have a strong relationship with
the City of Miami Beach and the new
Designs on
Design Miami
The forthcoming redevelopment
programme for the Miami Beach
Convention Center is likely to have an
impact not only on Art Basel in Miami
Beach itself, but also on the fair’s
closest neighbour, Design Miami, and
the city’s satellite fairs. A straw poll
of exhibitors at Design Miami/Basel
this week suggests that they are
unaware of the venue's proposed
redevelopment plans, but the
executive director of Design Miami,
Rodman Primack, says that it will be
business as usual next year. "Art Basel
is the most powerful art fair in the
world. It has established itself in
Miami as the premier cultural event—
and week—in the city because of the
fair’s quality, not its size. Moreover,
the long-term benefit that will be
realised by an expanded convention
centre is undeniable. Any temporary
change in size or location will not
affect Design Miami's long-term
success," he says. P.Pi.
Look familiar? Miami Beach abandoned plans to build a 52-acre, $1bn complex designed by OMA, Rem Koolhaas’s firm
mayor, Philip Levine,” says Marc
Spiegler, the director of Art Basel.
“They have given us every indication
that the smooth operation of the show
is of paramount importance to them
and we will be consulted at every stage
of the process.”
City to work with Art Basel
“The project will be a phased process
and the city will co-ordinate with Art
Basel during the planning of the
construction phase, which includes
keeping all four halls open for its
show,” says Maria Hernandez, the
capital projects adviser to the city
manager. Asked whether construction
would be put on hold during the fair
to avoid noise, Hernandez says that
the city’s contractors will “take
measures not to disrupt the show at
any time”.
The details remain unclear, but the
plans, which were released online by
the City last week, are finally back on
track. In November, city commissioners
decided to abandon the $1bn programme for a 52-acre site designed by
the architecture firm OMA, which is
led by Rem Koolhaas. Now, a less extensive redesign will be led by Fentress
Architects, which was a runner-up in
the original competition.
Charlotte Burns
Gated community
The German artist Tobias Rehberger
will unveil his second major commission in Miami Beach, which is
also his second permanent public
project in the US, this summer as
part of the city’s Art in Public
Places programme. Rehberger is
constructing a set of gates (right)
for the South Pointe Park Pier, with
a budget of $87,000. The gates will
be installed on the east side of the
park, opposite Rehberger’s 55ft-tall
work Obstinate Lighthouse, 2011, on
the west side of the site. C.B.
Empire-building
When Hauser Wirth & Schimmel opens in
Los Angeles in January, with the curator Paul
Schimmel as a partner, the gallery will rival
many museums in terms of its total global
footprint. The 100,000 sq. ft space (above)
is larger than the three buildings occupied
by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles (69,000 sq. ft), and is more than
three times the combined size of Hauser &
Wirth’s spaces in Zürich, New York, London
and Somerset (31,253 sq. ft). Hauser & Wirth
(2.0/C10) will soon occupy nearly as much
space as Gagosian Gallery (2.0/B15). In 2012,
The Art Newspaper calculated that Gagosian
had sprawled to 153,047 sq. ft across eight
cities; the gallery has since opened another
space in New York, at 75th Street and Park
Avenue, adding 1,000 sq. ft to its empire.
Mega-galleries such as these now far outstrip the sizes of contemporary art institutions such as New York’s New Museum
(around 15,000 sq. ft of exhibition space)
and other global commercial galleries such
as Galerie Perrotin (around 10,000 sq. ft in
Paris, New York and Hong Kong). P.P.
Business is blooming
New York’s Casey Kaplan gallery (2.1/N10) is
leaving Chelsea after ten years and moving
to the Flower District in early
2015. The gallery has taken
a ten-year lease on a
10,000 sq. ft space at
West 27th Street,
between Sixth and
Seventh Avenues. “It’s an
exciting neighbourhood that
is in transition. The storefront
wholesalers are moving on and new businesses are coming in,” Kaplan says. The new
location is “slightly out of the centre, which is
an interesting place to operate in. We [will]
become a destination gallery, but not so far
removed that it’s ridiculous to ask people to
come to see our shows.” Kaplan (above) is
keen to “explore a new area. It’s also about
being part of a [changing] neighbourhood,
and seeing what it’s going to become.” C.B.
Young Turks hit London
The leading Istanbul-based dealer
Rodeo (Feature, R11) is due to open a
second venue in Soho, central London,
this autumn. The gallery represents the
artists Ian Law, Emre Hüner, Iman Issa
and two nominees for this year’s Turner
Prize: Cardiff-born James Richards and the
Irish artist Duncan Campbell, who presented
works in the Scottish pavilion at last year’s
Venice Biennale. Another Turkish dealer, Pi
Artworks, opened a gallery last October in
Fitzrovia, central London. G.H.
Appointment in Basel
Art Basel has appointed a new head of
gallery relations. Daniel Lechner joins the
team next month after eight years with the
New York gallery Cheim & Read (2.0/C14),
where he was a sales associate. He previously worked for the Scope art fair. C.B.
Correction
In yesterday’s article about the Victoria
Miro gallery (p2), we wrote that Eric
Fischl had joined its roster of artists,
when, in fact, the gallery only has plans
to stage a forthcoming exhibition of his
work. We also stated that shows of work
by the artists Secundino Hernández and
Celia Paul will be staged in Victoria
Miro’s Mayfair gallery; they will, in fact,
take place in the Wharf Road space.
ART FAIR
WWW.POSITIONS.BERLIN
WWW.BERLINARTWEEK.DE
MIAMI BEACH: COURTESY OF OMA. HAUSER WIRTH & SCHIMMEL: COURTESY OF HAUSER & WIRTH/FREDRIK NILSEN
In the trade
ROBERT
LONGO
AT ART BASEL
STAND B11
P A R I S
S A L Z B U R G
R O P A C . N E T
4
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
NEWS ANALYSIS
Nigerian artists
in the spotlight
As new galleries and non-profit spaces open across
the country, interest in contemporary art from
Africa is growing abroad
Lagos. As Nigeria surges ahead of South
Africa to become the largest African
economy, its newly rich are buying
art. Last year the Nigerian art market
grew by 21.8%, while prices have risen
on average by 30% to 40% over the past
five years, according to Giles Peppiatt,
the director of contemporary African
art at Bonhams.
Perhaps the best-known artist living
in Nigeria is El Anatsui, who is due to
lead a discussion on curators as part of
the Art Basel Salon programme. He
was born in Ghana but moved in 1975,
where he began to teach art at the University of Nigeria. His shimmering tapestries made from flattened bottle tops
propelled him to international fame in
Anatsui will be talking about curators
who have influenced his career, including the founder of the Centre for
Contemporary Art (CCA) in Lagos, the
Nigerian Bisi Silva (he is also taking
part in the session), and the American
Robert Storr who worked with Anatsui
when he directed the international exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale.
“The role of the curator was traditionally very important because of the
lack of a gallery system in Nigeria,”
says Bomi Odufunade, who set up Dash
and Rallo Art Advisory in Lagos three
years ago and is also taking part in
the discussion.
In the past five years much has
changed. Now there are around ten
successful galleries and non-profit spaces
in Nigeria, including Omenka, Art Twenty One, the CCA and the African Artists’
“Many more artists now live and work in Nigeria.
The development of commercial galleries has not
kept up with the rapid growth of the market”
the early 2000s, and his work has since
been collected by institutions including
the British Museum in London, Centre
Pompidou, Paris, and the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, DC. In April,
Anatsui was elected an honorary Royal
Academician. Nigerian collectors such
as Prince Yemisi Shyllon and the retired
stockbroker Sammy Olagbaju were early
supporters of Anatsui, but today the
artist says a younger group of Nigerians
is “dominating the market”.
Until very recently there was no
commercial gallery network in Nigeria;
curators rather than dealers were crucial
to an artist’s development. At Art Basel,
Foundation. But Odufunade says it is
not enough: “There are many more
artists who now live and work in the
country. The development of commercial galleries has not kept up with the
rapid growth of the market.”
When Kavita Chellaram set up the
Lagos auction house Arthouse Contemporary in 2007, artists would exhibit
and sell works directly at auction. “At
that time we were fulfilling the role of
the gallery,” Chellaram says. “You can
still buy directly from artists, but gallery
representation is growing.” Chellaram
is not about to relinquish her role as
gallerist: she is opening a pop-up space
in September with an exhibition of
painterly installations by Kainebi Osahenye. A show by the octogenarian
artist Yusuf Grillo will follow in December. Chellaram also plans to open
a foundation in Lagos at the end of
this year, where artists will be able
to undertake three-month residencies.
If the Nigerian art market is still
emerging on a global scale, artists,
curators and collectors have been
part of a lively art scene since the
end of the Second World War. Chellaram says that five or six Nigerian
universities have good art schools,
compared with just one in Uganda,
and none in Kenya. Modern works
have a certain cachet and those created in the post-war decades tend
to attract the highest prices. At Bonhams’ “Africa Now” auction in London
in May, paintings from the 1970s by
Benedict Enwonwu and Yusuf Grillo
achieved the top prices, going for
£92,500 and £80,500 respectively. Giles
Peppiatt estimates that 70% of buyers
were from Africa or have connections
to Africa.
While Modern art is seen as a safe
bet, Nigerians are shying away from
The artist El Anatsui. Left,
contemporary African art under the
hammer at Bonhams in London
the contemporary. Anatsui says collectors—even the younger generation—
are still unwilling to buy sound, performance or conceptual art. “Collectors
mostly buy comfortable art and do not
go for controversial or out-of-the-ordinary works in terms of media, genre
or content,” he says.
International collectors, perhaps
more attuned to the contemporary
market, have been slower to invest in
Nigerian art. But art fairs such as
1:54, London’s first contemporary
African art fair, which launched last
October, are helping to raise the profile—and prices—of artists across the
continent. Institutional support has
also been forthcoming in the West. In
2012 the Tate set up its African art acquisitions committee, and last July
the museum held its first major exhibition of African Modernism, highlighting the work of the Sudanese
artist Ibrahim el-Salahi.
Nigeria still needs to develop its
museum network. With little government support for the arts in Africa,
Odufunade says private collectors will
have to pick up the tab. “At this moment
I know of people in Johannesburg,
Uganda and Nigeria who are planning
to build private museums,” she says.
“It’s the next logical step.”
Anny Shaw
• “The Artist and the Curator”, Art Basel
Salon, Saturday 21 June, 2pm, Hall 1
ANATSUI: © JONATHAN GREET/OCTOBER GALLERY, LONDON
AFRICAN ART
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
6
INTERVIEW
Feudalism returns
to the art world
Collector and academic Harald Falckenberg believes that elitism is back
T
Harald Falckenberg. Above, the
interior of Sammlung Falckenberg:
Deichtorhallen Hamburg
he Hamburg-based businessman Harald
Falckenberg turned his
attention to the world of
contemporary art in the
1990s. In under two
decades he built one of Germany’s
leading collections, focusing on
works by international avant-garde
artists. The 2,000 pieces in his collection are on display in a former tyre
factory in Hamburg, which in 2011
became an outpost of Deichtorhallen,
one of Europe’s largest centres for
contemporary art and photography.
For Art Basel’s first book, Year 44,
Falckenberg, who teaches art theory
at Hamburg’s Academy of Fine Arts,
contributed the essay “Every Era Gets
the Art World it Deserves”, a critical
look at the “spectacle” that underpins contemporary art appreciation
today. We asked Falckenberg how the
avant-garde project got lost and why
the art bubble won’t be bursting any
time soon.
years have more or less disappeared
since 2008. Today’s rich collectors see
highly rated art as a long-term investment and that’s still speculation in
my understanding. In contrast to a
few years ago, the market for
medium- and low-priced works of art
is stagnating or even recessive, naturally with exceptions, for instance
Banksy and others. Speculation will
always be a part of art collecting.
Does this endanger the traditional
gallery model?
Traditional galleries are having a hard
time. They generally don’t have
enough funds and staff to present
their artists internationally. Once
their artists become successful, they
leave and join internationally established galleries, or others, such as Jeff
Koons, Damien Hirst or Olafur
Eliasson, build their own companies
with up to 100 or more employees as
in historical times of the Renaissance
art schools. Commercial galleries
have not yet found a suitable solution, but more and more of them will
likely commit a substantial part of
their activities to the “secondary market” as art dealers.
Interview by Julia Michalska
The Art Newspaper: What characterises the art of our time?
Harald Falckenberg: In recent years
art has become ever more dominant,
with large-scale public events and
huge prices for important works that
only a few wealthy people, leading art
institutions and multi-national companies can afford. Having emerged
from the 1960s avant-garde’s goal of
anchoring popular and critical art
beyond elitist notions, this latest
development can confidently be
regarded as a step back towards the
re-feudalisation of art.
Harald Falckenberg
recommends
in London, with its five million visitors, is the world leader in this
respect, with New York’s Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA) not far behind.
And the competition continues. Tate
Modern and MoMA are planning new
exhibition spaces to increase the number of visitors by at least one million
in the next few years.
What factors have contributed
to this?
The major factors are the globalisation of the art market with the rise of
art fairs across the globe, the integration of contemporary art in the programmes of auction houses since the
1990s, and the increase in international biennials and triennials, with
nearly 100 taking place each year. The
role of private museums should not
be overstated, however. They are a
reaction to the trend of traditional
museums putting more and more
emphasis on temporary exhibitions
over their own collections. Nearly 80%
of their visitors are attracted by the
temporary exhibitions. Tate Modern,
You seem to make a distinction
between the art governed by the
art market and that by
biennials/exhibitions. Are there
two art worlds?
I would not say that there are different art worlds. The art world—a
term coined by the American critic
Arthur Danto in 1964—stands for a
complex referential system of
Modern and contemporary art.
Biennials and triennials are created
by curators and are large-scale, timebased events. Although the works in
these events cannot, just by their
size and dimensions, normally be
traded, the biennials and triennials
are substantially funded by galleries,
Everywhere is Art
Just look beyond the surface
© UBS 2014. All rights reserved.
“I’m sure that the
artist is being
rediscovered as a
person of resistance”
auction houses and even big collectors to improve the international
reputation of their artists. So the art
world should be understood as a network of mutual support.
Why do you think that the “oftcited art bubble” won’t burst?
Today’s international art world is
based on success and high prices. The
world’s rich put their money in recognised art as an investment. There is
talk of money laundering and a general flight to material assets in times
of low interest rates, but art is first
and foremost a luxury accessory and
a status symbol. Again and again, the
media report on new record prices for
art. Of similar or maybe even greater
importance is the sponsorship of art
by multi-national companies.
3501 colored pencils
Volkswagen and BMW, just two examples, have long-term contracts with
MoMA and Tate Modern to increase
the value of their products. Along
with showbiz celebrities and star athletes, art has become a third avenue
for their promotional activities. It’s a
logical choice, because images can be
understood everywhere and represent
desires, longings and individuality,
independent of language. So today’s
art is consolidated in the international world of business, glamour,
events and supported by the print
and online media. The set-up is perfect and would not work without
stars and top prices. That’s why the
oft-cited art bubble won’t burst, provided, naturally, that the whole system will not collapse.
Christian Marclay’s
new installation
Unlimited, Basel
JUNE 19-22
• At this year’s Art Basel I’ll certainly visit
the new installation [by] Christian Marclay
at Unlimited. Marclay is one of my
favourite artists. His video films are never
alike and always open new perspectives.
Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010
MoMA, New York
UNTIL AUGUST 3
• In July I will visit New York—it will be a
must to see the retrospective of Sigmar
Polke at MoMA. For me Polke is the most
important post-war German artist. His
work is variable, full of surprise and always
accompanied by a touch of humour.
Bill Viola’s Martyrs
St Paul’s Cathedral, London
ONGOING
Why do you say that the speculators have disappeared? Sky-high
contemporary auction prices seem
to indicate the opposite.
That was a misunderstanding. I only
wanted to say that the speculators
who drove the market in the past ten
• On my way back to Europe, I will have a
stop-over in London. Bill Viola is not my
cup of tea because of the theatricality of
his work. But he’s a great artist and I look
forward to seeing how he manages to get
along with St Paul’s Cathedral.
SAMMLUNG: HENNING ROGGE/DEICHTORHALLEN
Is this a pessimistic view?
It’s a realistic view. Art is a mirror of
society. Marcel Duchamp once said
that good art always comes from the
underground. This is still valid.
Today’s economic and political systems are fragile and call for counterculture interventions. I’m sure that
the artist is being rediscovered as a
person of resistance.
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THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
9
FEATURE
Making waves: choreography
moves into the museum
Museums and galleries are increasingly playing host to artist choreographers, who are performing site-specific integral works
Xavier Le Roy
performing a work
based on Stravinsky’s
“The Rite of Spring”
VINCENT CAVAROC SACRE
A
rt and dance have had
a close relationship,
from the Modernist
flowerings of the
Ballet Russes to the
downtown scene in
1970s New York. They have remained
largely distinct disciplines until
recently, but choreographers’ work is
increasingly being incorporated into
museum and gallery programmes,
and as integral works rather than
interruptions from a distinct artform.
Art Basel brings some of the leading
figures in dance together for “The
Artist as Choreographer”, Friday’s
Conversation, chaired by Hans
Ulrich Obrist and featuring the
choreographic artists Alexandra
Bachzetsis, Xavier Le Roy and
Isabel Lewis.
The background to this phenomenon is the two disciplines’ mutual
interest in expanding definitions of
what art and dance might be, and in
bringing art and everyday life into a
closer relationship. Bachzetsis’s work
is emblematic of this shift. She has
recently devised works for Documenta
13 and the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, and will appear in the
BMW Tate Live event at Tate Modern,
London, in October. She is interested
in how different spaces—the theatre,
the museum, the gallery, online
space—“condition both the human
body and the contemporary status of
performance practice”, she says.
The museum version
of Bachzetsis’s work
is “more shared
than consumed”
In The Stages of Staging, which she
first performed last year at the
Stedelijk, she says she changes the
“timing and dramaturgy of the performance according to the specific
conditions of the museum, with
regard to its opening hours, versus
the conventional opening night of
the theatre”. In the work, ten performers appear in a gym-like space
which is also a film set, leading to a
work that is “part live performance,
part intervention and part restaging
of live-recorded video images”. Their
movements draw upon references
ranging from a film by Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, “Warnung vor
einer Heiligen Nutte” (Beware of a
Holy Whore), and British Northern
Soul dancing to “the seemingly endless (re)appropriation of pop songs
and their cover versions”, she says,
ultimately leading to an exploration
of “self-staging and self-design”.
The theatre version is included
within the museum performance,
before being deconstructed in a twoand-a-half-hour “interlude” in which
“you see where the references come
from and you look more behind the
scenes”. The theatre version is then
repeated, “but it’s a lot more threedimensional, turned around, twisted,
made more intense”.
However, in From A to B via C,
which Bachzetsis is currently developing and will perform at the Tate
Modern, the choreography’s length
will remain equal in both theatre
and museum versions—only the spatial conditions will change. “In From
A to B via C, the relationship between
performer, space and the public
inhabiting it is very important,” she
says. “In the theatre version, we perform the piece for an audience
watching us, whereas in the museum
we stage it among people watching
both themselves and us.” The
CONTINUED ON PAGE 10
10
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
FEATURE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9
museum version is therefore “more
shared than consumed”.
Dance and non-dance
Alexandra Bachzetsis’s The Stages of Staging. Right, Isabel Lewis, who uses bodies—human, plant and objects—in her work
from there, and did something from
that position that anybody can do,
somehow,” he says.
A collage of movement
Lewis, who has performed at the
Serpentine Galleries in London and
the New Museum in New York, also
taps into everyday movement. She is
interested in “looking for dance as
it’s embedded in life”, she says, using
the club in which she DJs in her current home, Berlin, as “a place of
research”, for instance.
Both Lewis and Bachzetsis speak
about their work almost as a collage
of movement. “Choreography is
bringing things into relation in
time,” Lewis says, “and that can be
human bodies, plant bodies, object
bodies, all different kinds of bodies.
Of course, a painting does that, a
sculpture can do that, an installation
can do that, but there’s that additional element of time and duration—composing within something
that’s contingent and mutable and
shiftable. That, for me, is key to
what’s interesting about dance
and choreography.”
She argues that dance should not
be separated from other cultural
forms. “I find the division of the
senses problematic and I’m much
more interested in bringing them
together. I feel that we are in a cultural moment where we are less able
to believe in stable notions and fixed
truths, and we need to find ways to
Fraenkel Gallery
MEL BOCHNER, Color Crumple, 1967/2011
think and build thoughts upon contingencies and partial connections.
“Choreography can give us ways to
access strategies of reading and composing situations in all of their multiform and ever changing complexity.
And I think that’s maybe why choreography can be so prevalent in culture, and in galleries and museums
all over the place.”
Ben Luke
• “The Artist as Choreographer”, Art Basel
Conversation, Friday 20 June, 10am, Hall 1
fraenkelgallery.com
Hall 2.0 Stand A15 ART BASEL
BACHZETSIS: © MELANIE HOFMANN. LEWIS: ISABEL LEWIS/JOANNA SEITZ
Le Roy, who has recently made work
for the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in
Barcelona and the Hayward Gallery in
London, was part of a radical group of
French choreographers who drew
other disciplines into dance in the
1990s, and is suspicious of attempts to
pigeonhole his work.
“When I started to do choreography, I was put in the category of
‘non-dance’,” he says. “But now that I
do work in exhibition spaces, people
say: ‘You want to bring dance into
the museum’. And I say, ‘No, I don’t
want to bring dance into the
museum, I can do work for an exhibition space, but how can I bring dance
into the museum when I’ve been categorised as a non-dance person?’ This
shows the limit of this apparatus that
looks at the discipline in a very narrow way.”
Le Roy says he likes “to work
from the position of being ignorant
in something”, following the idea of
Jacques Rancière, the French
philosopher, “that everybody has
the ability to learn from the point
of not knowing, and that’s where
we should somehow try to meet
and work in order to produce
something”. He cites his
performance based on Stravinksy’s
“The Rite of Spring”. “I used gestures
of the movement of a conductor,
conducting an orchestra, and I
started from the position that I’ve
had no education in music, I don’t
know how to read music. So I started
FONDATION BEYELER
18. 5. – 7. 9. 2014
RIEHEN / BASEL
www.fondationbeyeler.ch
THE INTERNATIONAL
EXPOSITION
OF CONTEMPORARY
& MODERN ART
18–21
SEPTEMBER
2014
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PARTICIPATING GALLERIES
Studio: Laura Letinsky / #8
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Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe
New York
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San Francisco
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New York
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Berlin | London
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contemporary art Amsterdam
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Chicago
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San Francisco
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New York | Beijing
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Milan | London
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Marc Foxx Los Angeles
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Richard Gray Gallery
Chicago | New York
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Carl Hammer Gallery Chicago
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Santa Monica
Galerie Ernst Hilger/Hilger NEXT
Vienna
Hill Gallery Birmingham | Detroit
Nancy Hoffman Gallery New York
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Vivian Horan Fine Art New York
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Berlin | Singapore
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New York | London | Madrid |
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San Francisco
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Laurence Miller Gallery New York
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THE MISSION Chicago | Houston
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New York
Salon 94 New York
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Galerie Thomas Schulte Berlin
Carrie Secrist Gallery Chicago
Marc Selwyn Fine Art Beverly Hills
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Shoichiro/Galerie Sho
Contemporary Art Tokyo
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Jessica Silverman Gallery
San Francisco
Manny Silverman Gallery
Los Angeles
André Simoens Gallery
Knokke-Zoute
Fredric Snitzer Gallery Miami
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Los Angeles
MARC STRAUS New York
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San Francisco
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Leslie Tonkonow
Artworks + Projects New York
Vincent Vallarino New York
Van Doren Waxter New York
Susanne Vielmetter
Los Angeles Projects Los Angeles
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Weinstein Gallery Minneapolis
Whitestone Gallery Tokyo
Max Wigram Gallery London
Zolla/Lieberman Gallery Chicago
Pavel Zoubok Gallery New York
David Zwirner Gallery
New York | London
EXPOSURE
Blackston New York
Bourouina Berlin
Brand New Gallery Milan
Callicoon Fine Arts New York
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Lisa Cooley New York
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Greene Exhibitions Los Angeles
Hannah Hoffman Gallery
Los Angeles
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Charlie James Gallery Los Angeles
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
Los Angeles
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Longhouse Projects New York
Luce Gallery Torino
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Mihai Nicodim Gallery
Los Angeles | Bucharest
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San Francisco
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Y Gallery New York
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14
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
IN PICTURES
Living
it large
1
Design Miami/Basel creates a space
for oversized works that add a new
dimension to the fair
D
esign Miami/Basel’s inaugural Design At
Large programme includes a presentation
of six large-scale pieces. These works take
centre stage, embracing the internal
oculus of Hall 1 Süd, the building on the
Messeplatz designed by the Swiss architects
Herzog & de Meuron.
“Having a big, dramatic space was a real impetus, because
it enables us to show something unexpected,” says Rodman
Primack, the new executive director of Design Miami/Basel.
“These days, many people get their art experience at a fair,
rather than in a gallery or museum, and they will never have
seen installations by some of these designers. This work brings
energy and excitement to the fair and encourages a broader
conversation about design.”
Design at Large “adds a new dimension by extending the
fair’s parameters and opening the door to site-specific pieces”,
says the programme’s curator, Dennis Freedman, who is the
creative director of the department store Barneys in New York.
“It’s very important to show work outside the traditional
boundaries of a gallery’s booth, because it enables designers to
explore conceptual ideas without the limitations of commercial concerns or scale. They can express what’s really going on
in their heads. And it enables collectors to understand what’s
at the core of their thinking.”
“I wanted someone with a creative eye to organise the initial programme,” Primack says. “Dennis is such an important
figure in the US publishing, art, design and fashion worlds.
As an incredible collector, he is very well versed in the
language of collectible design. Other curators will bring
different perspectives to future editions.”
Submissions from Design Miami/Basel’s exhibiting
galleries generated more than 20 proposals, from which
Freedman selected six designs. “The criterion was very simple—it’s about poetry,” he says. “For something to be truly
worth collecting, it needs to go beyond the cerebral. Designs
must be conceptually rich, with meaning and content on
many levels. Much of the work I chose is about mutation,
change, fluctuation and interaction. It’s concerned with how
we live. This common thread wasn’t a conscious one, but it
emerged as I responded to the pieces.”
The twin-pendulum Drawing Machine, 2011, by Eske Rex,
presented by Galerie Maria Wettergren, is set in motion by
hand. Made from wood, steel, concrete, paper and a ballpoint
pen, it explores the relationship between time and movement. Dominic Harris’s Ice Angel, 2012, presented by
Priveekollektie, is similarly kinetic. His imaginative digital
design encourages visitors to become performers-cum-portrait
subjects, with wing shapes unfurling from their shoulders as
their arms move.
Visitors are also invited to participate in an installation by
the US artist Sheila Hicks. Séance, 2014, presented by Demisch
Danant, is an interactive colour “lab” that gives an insight into
a fundamental aspect of Hicks’s design process through colour
experimentation. Meanwhile, Chris Kabel’s organic Wood Ring
bench, 2010, presented by Galerie Kreo, encourages people to
engage with its circular form.
Anton Alvarez’s Thread Wrapping Architecture 290414, 2014,
presented by Gallery Libby Sellers, highlights the designer’s
working processes. The 3m-high arches and columns were
created using Alvarez’s innovative thread-wrapping machine,
which he uses to bind furniture components without
screws or nails.
The only historical piece is Maison Bulle Six Coques, 1965,
which was originally shown at the Salon des Arts Ménagers
in France in 1956 by the urban architect and theorist Jean
Benjamin Maneval. The work is presented here by Jousse
Entreprise. Made entirely of reinforced polyester, Maneval’s
“bubble house” remained a prototype until it was produced
by Batiplastique for an “experimental” resort in the Pyrenées;
around 30 were made. Jousse Entreprise bought 18 of the
works and has restored some of them (the example on show
here did not require restoration), and has around ten available for sale.
Will these large-scale designs sell? “My assumption is that
there will be collectors interested in buying,” Freedman says.
“There are pieces here I’d be interested in collecting. They
have the potential to enlighten and change perceptions by
showing things in a new way.”
Nicole Swengley
• Design at Large, Hall 1 Süd, until 22 June (11am-7pm)
2
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
15
3
4
5
1
Jean Benjamin Maneval, Maison
Bulle Six Coques, 1965, Jousse
Entreprise (1.1 Süd/G09),
around €250,000
2
Sheila Hicks, Séance, 2014,
Demisch Danant (1.1 Süd/G23),
around $1m
3
Anton Alvarez, Thread Wrapping
Architecture 290414, 2014,
Gallery Libby Sellers (1.1 Süd/
G22), around £40,000
4
Chris Kabel, Wood Ring, 2010,
Galerie Kreo (1.1 Süd/G14),
€45,000 (edition of eight)
5
Dominic Harris, Ice Angel, 2012,
Priveekollektie (1.1 Süd/G16),
€145,000 (edition of eight)
6
Eske Rex, Drawing Machine,
2011, Galerie Maria Wettergren
(1.1 Süd/G48), €70,000 (edition
of three)
7
Jamie Zigelbaum, Triangular
Series, 2014, design commission
(1.0 Süd), price undisclosed
7
PHOTOS: © DAVID OWENS
6
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
16
INTERVIEW
Konstantin Grcic
Designer
Serious concepts,
playful designs
Humour, technological innovation and an exploration of public and private
space all feature in Konstantin Grcic’s biggest show to date
acclaimed pieces include the geometric “Chair One”, 2004, which is made
by the furniture company Magis and
combines strength with super-lightweight materials, and the versatile
“Mayday” lamp, 1999, made by Flos,
with its integral suspension hook
and cable-wind. He has also created
objects for Authentics, Krups, Muji
and Vitra. In his current show, Grcic
tackles much bigger concepts, illustrated by large-scale installations
images in the exhibition: these are
not solutions to be copied, they are
statements that I make to trigger
debate. I want people to reflect on
certain ideas or concepts,” he says.
The exploration of what constitutes private and public space is best
encapsulated in the juxtaposition of
two kinds of environments: installations representing the home and the
work studio, and a third that illustrates a fictional urban landscape.
“Everyday life and the ordinary are what we work
with. My mission is to reinterpret the ordinary”
that present his vision of future environments and their relationship
with design.
“‘Vision’ is a big word,” Grcic says,
“and I have difficulty with the word.
My idea for the exhibition is more
about asking questions and making
people aware of preconceived ideas
about life and about the future.” He
hopes that the show is open-ended,
encouraging interpretation and provoking discussion. “I am creating
“Is private space my home? Is it
where I sleep, cook or watch television? I want people to understand that
private space can be free of those preconceptions,” Grcic says. In contrast,
the urban environment, the 30m-long
“panorama” of the show’s title, questions our definition of public space.
“I wanted to create a sensation of
being in another space, another
world, of not being enclosed, but on a
viewing platform, looking out onto a
Clockwise from top left: Grcic’s “Tom Tom & Tam Tam” tables, 1991; “Chair One”,
2004; the designer’s “Tip” waste bin, 2003; and his “Mayday” lamp, 1999
landscape,” the designer says. “The
idea is that a public space is not a
space that is controlled by anyone. It
is not created by an architect or an
urban planner; we can contribute to
that space. It is made for the public,
whatever their needs or desires.”
The fourth installation is a long
vitrine containing a sequence of
objects—some found, some he has
designed, some that have influenced
the designer—all selected by Grcic.
“One object leads to the next and creates a storyline. I am using this to
talk about certain projects and things
I like that are meaningful to my
work. It’s not chronological. We can
take the same objects and put them
in a different order and create a different narrative,” he says.
Among the items are prototypes
that demonstrate Grcic’s working
practices. “For example, there’s a very
rough wooden mock-up we made for
a product that later came on the market. It’s the ‘360 Stool’ [2009], made
by Magis, and the mock-up is the key.
We knocked it up using rough planks,
SAVE
THE DATE
19-21 SEPTEMBER, 2014
CENTRAL EXHIBITION HALL MANÈGE, MANÈGE SQUARE 1, MOSCOW
THE ONLY INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR IN RUSSIA
“CHAIR ONE” AND “MAYDAY”: COLLECTION VITRA DESIGN
MUSEUM; PHOTO: FLORIAN BÖHM; © KGID. “TIP”: © KGID
T
he growing use of social
media to share information about ourselves
inevitably results in the
erosion of our concept
of privacy. Do we now
expect all information to be in the
public domain? Or are some aspects of
our lives meant to remain unmonitored, unshared, private? Last month’s
ruling by the European Union’s Court
of Justice to allow internet users to
erase information about themselves
from search engines, such as Google,
may signal the beginnings of a backlash, but doesn’t this case further
complicate the blurring of the boundaries between private and public
space? This is one of the key concepts
in “Panorama”, the largest exhibition
to date of the work of the industrial
designer Konstantin Grcic, at the Vitra
Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
Grcic is perhaps best known for
domestic-scale creations that combine the functional with the experimental, the serious with the quirky.
Technology plays a vital part in the
process and the outcome. His most
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
17
EXHIBITION: © KGID. GRCIC: PHOTO: MARKUS JANS
Something old, something
new: the Vitra show includes
objects Grcic found as well
as those he has designed
nails and screws, and when you see it
next to the stool, there is very little
connection. It shows the journey
between the idea and the finished
item. It carries the spirit and the
essence of the original, although the
final product is a very refined, massproduced product.”
Grcic’s designs have always incorporated new technologies; another
key theme of the show is an analysis
of current technological shifts and
how these contribute to innovation
in contemporary design. “Digital
technology changes the tools that we
have for creating and producing
work. It changes from the empirical
process, which involves personal
choice, to a digital one involving algorithms. It questions even the authorship of the creative process… authorship could be replaced by an
algorithm. The origin of production is
questioned by new forms of producing: you download a file and you go
to the copy shop and get it printed.”
Technological change is led by new
processes or new materials, and in his
latest project, Grcic combines the two.
“We are currently working on using a
combination of a hi-tech composite
material—carbon fibre—and the most
traditional material for furniture,
wood,” he says. “We are trying to combine the two technologies, making it
into one technology. But you are not
always looking for the most innovative. Sometimes you go back to a classic material. It is what is most appropriate or valid or sustainable. We
don’t use technology for technology’s
sake. It has to be relevant.”
If this all sounds very serious, it is,
but that doesn’t necessarily preclude
an injection of playfulness. Grcic’s
designs have tended to include a sly
element of humour. How does this
play with the manufacturers?
“I think they are relieved that it’s
not just another piece of serious
design. I am serious about the work I
do and the companies I work with,
but at the same time, I am enjoying
the projects and want to express that.
My clients have no problem with
that: it’s part of a shared passion for
the work. We make things that are
not just functional and rational, but
add joy and beauty.”
Certainly there are many objects
that make serious design look like
fun. And that is perhaps Grcic’s greatest talent: to take the everyday and
make it extraordinary. “Everyday life
and the ordinary are what we work
with. My mission is to reinterpret the
ordinary,” he says.
The everyday objects he has transformed into objects of beauty include
the “2 Hands” laundry basket, 1996,
designed for Authentics, the “Miura”
bar stool, 2005, for Plank, the
“Karbon” chaise longue, 2008, for
Galerie Kreo, the “Pipe” desk, 2009,
for Muji-Thonet, and the “Blow” side
table, 2010, for Established & Sons.
Of all his designs, which one does
Grcic believe states his mission best?
“The items I am most proud of are
the ones that don’t need the exhibition because they’re out there in the
market—they have their own life.”
Pas Paschali
• “Panorama”, Vitra Design Museum,
until 14 September. For more details,
visit www.design-museum.de
Biography
Konstantin Grcic
1965 Born in Munich
1985-87 Trains as a cabinet-maker at the
John Makepeace School in Dorset, England
1988-90 Gains a Master of Arts in design
at the Royal College of Art, London
1990-91 Works for Jasper Morrison in
London
1991 Sets up Konstantin Grcic Industrial
Design in Munich
1995 First major show (“Konstantin Grcic
Twinset”) at Binnen Gallery, Amsterdam
1997 Named young designer of the year by
German magazine “Architektur & Wohnen”
2001 Awarded the Compasso d’Oro prize
for his “Mayday” lamp (made by Flos)
2009 Organises “Design Real” exhibition
at the Serpentine Gallery, London
2010 Wins designer of the year award at
Design Miami
2011 Awarded the Compasso d’Oro for his
“Myto” chair (made by Plank)
2012 Exhibition design for the German
Pavilion, 13th Venice Architecture Biennale
2014 Wins the German Design Council’s
gold German Design Award for his “Pro”
chair (made by Flötotto)
pacegallery.com
Joan Miró, Femme dans la nuit, 1945 (detail) and Eduardo Chillida, Consejo al Espacio IX, 2000 (detail) at Ordovas
© Zabalaga-Leku, DACS, London, 2014 / © Successió Miró / ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2014
5 June — 26 July 2014
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen
Typewriter Eraser (detail), 1977, acrylic on
aluminum, stainless steel and ferrocement
35 x 35 x 28" (88.9 x 88.9 x 71.1 cm)
Booth B20 Hall 2.0
June 19– 22, 2014
25 SAVILE ROW, LONDON W1
+44 (0)20 7287 5013
WWW.ORDOVASART.COM
18
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
BOOKS
When art hits
close to home
The Korean artist
Do Ho Suh’s Fallen
Star, 2012,
installed at the
Stuart Collection
in San Diego
CULTURAL THEORY
T
hat the home is an
extension of the self is a
truism familiar to a generation whose student
years coincided with a
boom in daytime television programmes on the subject of
interior decoration. Those series
shared the schedules with dulcettoned pop psychiatrists who took
great care to remind their viewers
that the human self was a divided
one, that we do not know ourselves.
A logical conclusion based on
these founding principles of our individualistic, consumerist age is that
the idea of “home” is a conflicted
one: part sanctuary, part storehouse
for our darkest instincts, fears and
traumas. Sigmund Freud described
the German word heimlich (“homely”)
as denoting “on the one hand… what
is familiar and agreeable, and on the
other, what is concealed and kept out
of sight”. When the latter displaces
the former, the comfortable notion of
home is subverted and disrupted. The
word “domestic” is equally familiar as
a prefix to bliss and abuse.
Playing at Home: The House in
Contemporary Art presents the incorporation of the physical architectures
of the house into recent art practice
as symptomatic of this ambiguity.
The house or home has become a
familiar trope of installation art, from
the London-born Michael Landy’s fullscale reconstruction of his childhood
home, Semi-detached, 2004, in Tate
Britain, to the Korean artist Do Ho
Suh’s crashed houses.
Artists, like all of us, vacillate
between a yearning for the safety of
home—a sanctuary, we feel its loss
more deeply in a globalised society—
and the urge to expose its terrors, to
liberate the madwoman from the
attic and the skeletons from the
closet. Playing at Home surveys the
myriad roles that the idea of home
have served when incorporated into
art made since the 1960s.
Gill Perry’s particular angle on
the theme is the centrality of “play”
to the production and criticism of
contemporary art. “Playing” here is
posited as “essential to creativity
and the search for the self in both
child and adult”, an open-ended
exercise that can include humour,
subversion and paradox. By playing
with preconceived ideas of home—by
splitting a house in two, in the case
of Gordon Matta-Clark in Splitting,
1974; by exploding a shed, as
Cornelia Parker did with Cold Dark
Matter: An Exploded View, 1991; or, like
Simon Starling, by turning a shed
into a boat and back again in
Shedboatshed, 2005—the artist is able
to make us think again about the
physical edifices that we live in as
restaging of family relationships and
conflicts”. This strikes me as a rather
neat formulation for the practice of
art itself. By rearranging the world,
artists such as Louise Bourgeois alert
us to what is hidden in plain view.
A practical example of the means
by which creative practice can ask us
to reconsider the idea of house and
home is provided by Detroit’s
Heidelberg Project. It began in 1986
as a means of drawing attention to
the neglected streets in the city’s
The idea of “home” is a conflicted one: part
sanctuary, part storehouse for our darkest fears
“the spaces through which modern
social, gendered and familial cultures
are expressed”, and through which,
therefore, they can be challenged.
This aspect of Perry’s investigation
finds its strongest expression in a
chapter devoted to miniaturisation.
Speaking of the doll’s house, she says
that “its function as a ‘toy’ enables
the child to play-act, to pursue transgressive desires in, for example, the
unconventional rearrangement of
rooms, displacement of furniture, or
crumbling suburbia by decorating
abandoned houses in lurid colours
and affixing reclaimed junk to the
facades. Perry claims that these
houses, which have been transformed
into colourful, irreverent symbols of
collective creativity, “position art
practice as both playful and serious”.
As Freud said, “the opposite of
play is not what is serious, but what
is real”. “Playing” here makes us
aware of the way that the world of
“real” action, of political will and
At locations across the city
13th – 16th November 2014
contemporaryistanbul.com
social organisation, is failing to
address our concerns over the notion
of home (and homeland). For his
work Seizure, 2008/2013, the artist
Roger Hiorns transformed a condemned south London flat into a
sparkling crystalline grotto, which
served a similar purpose. The home
in these cases extends beyond the
personal to become an “ongoing
focus of social and political struggle”.
All of which might sound like
rather heavy-going. In fact, despite a
slightly plodding introduction and
the occasional tendency to use preexisting theories as a safety net rather
than a searchlight, Perry has written
a scholarly, readable and timely survey of an important theme. This book
reminds us of the capacity of art to
deepen our understanding of a contested, contentious concept whose
centrality to the way we live today
will not have escaped anyone living
in Europe during the recent elections.
Benjamin Eastham
Playing at Home: the House
in Contemporary Art
Gill Perry
Reaktion Books, 264pp, £17.95 (pb)
DO HO SUH: PHOTO: PHILIPP SCHOLZ RITTERMANN
An exploration of the house in contemporary practice
“La Montagne”, 1955-1956. Bronze, patina with gold finish.
185 x 330 x 130 cm / 72 13/16 x 129 15/16 x 51 3/16 inches. ©Archives Françoise Guiter.
GERMAINE
RICHIER
Booth #K24 / Halle 2.1
20
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
MEDIA
Taking literary theories onto the
cinema screen: a still from RobbeGrillet’s 1970 film “Eden and After”
When cinema
lost the plot
Gonzalez-Foerster and others”. Colard
regards Robbe-Grillet’s films as “the
continuation of his narrative, experimental and non-realistic literature,
but with a deep [understanding] of
the specificity of the medium”.
Among those who paid tribute in
London were Olafur Eliasson, Dan
Graham, Carsten Höller, Runa Islam
and Cerith Wyn Evans. Also present
were the French-born, New Yorkbased video artist Michel Auder and
the French architect Philippe Rahm,
both of whom regard Robbe-Grillet’s
written work as superior to his films.
Auder says: “His novels are ‘pure cinema’… [but] his film works are
extremely conventional, even [if] the
subject matter is not.”
Rahm collaborated with RobbeGrillet on a show at the Canadian
Centre for Architecture in 2006, and
his interest in the writer’s theories
stems from the idea that “architecture
has nothing to do with narrative storytelling [or] interpretation… it [is] more
to create [an] objective space”. For
Rahm, it is Robbe-Grillet’s writing that
is his key contribution, but his films
form a significant part of a hugely
respected body of work. Despite being
elected, in 2004, to the prestigious,
40-strong Académie Française, RobbeGrillet was never formally inducted
because he refused to have his speech
approved in advance and declined to
wear the robes of office. As ever, compromise wasn’t an option.
Iain Millar
The late French theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet rejected
conventional style in his soon-to-be-released films
NEW DVD
T
he influential French
novelist, literary theorist and film-maker
Alain Robbe-Grillet once
said that “nowhere in all
the world has anywhere
been less interested in my work than
in Britain”. Robbe-Grillet died in 2008,
so it’s not possible to know whether
he would have been comforted by the
British Film Institute’s imminent
release of a collection of six of his
films, along with accompanying
essays and interviews, plus introductions to his work by his wife and collaborator, Catherine.
Robbe-Grillet was a pioneer of the
so-called nouveau roman literary style,
which sought to promote literature
that dispensed with the conventions
of narrative and closure, plot and
structure. His critical writings on the
subject were collected in Pour un
Nouveau Roman in 1963. He published
four experimental novels between
1953 and 1961, when he worked on
what is perhaps his best known
project: the script for Alain Resnais’s
film “Last Year at Marienbad”, which
won the top prize at the Venice Film
Festival in 1961 and was nominated
for the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1963.
The films he would go on to make
took his literary theories onto the cinema screen, although not everyone
agrees on how successful this transition was. They are tough, often visually striking films with fragmented
timelines and narratives, and they
increasingly (and often shockingly)
His films increasingly
involve his interest in
sado-masochism
involve his own interest in sadomasochism, a feature of his life with
Catherine. They can leave contemporary viewers—those used to a more
enlightened sexual politics, at least—
feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
The forthcoming release is not the
first time that a UK institution has
highlighted Robbe-Grillet’s contribution to the arts. In September 2007,
he made one of his last public appearances at a weekend of presentations
and screenings organised by the
Serpentine Gallery in London. The
event was organised by Hans Ulrich
Obrist, the gallery’s co-director, and
the French curator and critic JeanMax Colard, who drew the audience’s
attention to Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic
references to Yves Klein and
Mondrian, as well as reminding them
of his short fiction works, which
include appearances by his sometime
collaborator Robert Rauschenberg
and Jasper Johns.
Colard told The Art Newspaper that
this was the first time that RobbeGrillet had been brought together
with the contemporary visual artists
he had influenced. However, the curator “always had the feeling that there
has been, since the 1970s, a ‘perfume
of nouveau roman’ in the art scene—in
David Lamelas’s videos, in John
Baldessari’s photo-paintings and,
later, in the work of Dominique
• To buy “Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films”
(released later this summer), visit
www.bfi.org.uk/shop. Thanks to the
Serpentine Galleries, London, for providing
archive materials
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WARHOL
Sculptures, Collages and Drawings
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PREVIEW AD INVITI
GIOVEDI 22 GENNAIO DALLE 12 ALLE 21
ORARI
DA VENERDI 23 A DOMENICA 25 DALLE 11 ALLE 19
LUNEDI 26 GENNAIO DALLE 11 ALLE 17
PREVIEW BY INVITATION ONLY
THURSDAY JANUARY 22 FROM 12 AM TO 9 PM
OPENING TIMES
FRIDAY 23 TO SUNDAY JANUARY 25 FROM 11 AM TO 7 PM
MONDAY JANUARY 26 FROM 11 AM TO 5 PM
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
CALENDAR
Art Basel week, 17-22 June
Listings are arranged
alphabetically by category
FAIRS
Art Basel
19-22 JUNE
Messeplatz 10
www.artbasel.com
KEY
Listings are arranged
alphabetically by area
쏍 Commercial gallery
Classical allusions given
a contemporary twist
Deuxpiece
A survey of Charles Ray’s work illustrates the gradual shift back to figurative sculpture
• Artists’ Window, Space Tag—
Alltag: Matthias Aeberli, Sabine
Hertig and Madeleine Jaccard
C
www.dock-basel.ch
Design Miami/Basel
UNTIL 22 JUNE
UNTIL 22 JUNE
ontemporary art suffered a
major blow when Charles
Ray’s sculpture Boy With
Frog, 2009, was removed
from Punta della Dogana in
Venice. When the city council failed to renew the permit for the sitespecific sculpture, which was commissioned by François Pinault, major art-world
figures including the curator Francesco
Bonami and the critic Jerry Saltz were outraged—but to no avail. The tip of the
island, where the Grand Canal meets the
Giudecca, is now adorned by a 19th-century
lamp-post. Ironically, Ray’s 8ft-tall, starkwhite, naturalistic sculpture could have
been misconstrued as one of the Classical
works that the city council prefers.
Making its first museum appearance,
Boy With Frog is one of 15 works featured
in “Charles Ray: Sculpture 1997-2014”, a
two-venue exhibition organised by the
Kunstmuseum Basel and the Museum für
Gegenwartskunst. Most of the works in
the show are large-scale and will be shown
in their own rooms, says Bernhard
Mendes Bürgi, the director of the
Kunstmuseum Basel. He has co-organised
the exhibition with James Rondeau from
the Art Institute of Chicago, where the
show will travel next year.
Uferstrasse 40
www.scope-art.com
Leading sculptor
Hall 1 Süd Messeplatz
www.designmiami.com
I Never Read,
Art Book Fair Basel
UNTIL 21 JUNE
Volkshaus Basel, Utengasse 9
www.ineverread.com
Liste
UNTIL 22 JUNE
Burgweg 15
www.liste.ch
Selection Artfair
UNTIL 22 JUNE
Riehentorstrasse 33
www.selection-art.com
The Solo Project
UNTIL 22 JUNE
Brüglingerstrasse 19-21
www.the-solo-project.com
Volta 10
SLEEPING WOMAN: AP, GLENSTONE; PHOTO: JOSHUA WHITE; COURTESY OF MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY. UNPAINTED SCULPTURE: PHOTO: JOSHUA WHITE; COURTESY OF MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY. BOY WITH FROG: PHOTO: CHARLES RAY; COURTESY OF MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
UNTIL 21 JUNE
Markthalle, Viaduktstrasse 10
www.voltashow.com
Scope
EXHIBITIONS
IN THE CITY
BASEL, SWITZERLAND
Antikenmuseum
St Alban-Graben 5
• Roma Eterna: 2,000 Years of
Sculpture from the Collections
of Santarelli and Zeri
UNTIL 16 NOVEMBER
www.antikenmuseumbasel.ch
Artachment
Hochbergerstrasse 160
• We're All Nomads:
Daniela Brugger
UNTIL 29 JUNE
www.artachment.com
Ausstellungsraum
Klingental
Kasernenstrasse 23
• #38 Kill All Monsters
UNTIL 29 JUNE
www.ausstellungsraum.ch
Cartoonmuseum Basel
St Alban, Vorstadt 28
• The World According to Plonk
and Replonk: Views of Basel
UNTIL 22 JUNE
www.cartoonmuseum.ch
Depot Basel
Voltastrasse 43
• Craft and Bling Bling
UNTIL 6 JULY
www.depotbasel.ch
23
Ray, who was born in Chicago and is now
based in Los Angeles, is regarded by some
as one of the leading sculptors of the past
20 years. His work comes out of a rich
background of high-Modernist sculpture—
he cites Anthony Caro and David Smith as
his early influences. But in the past few
decades, he has emerged as one of a handful of artists, along
with Jeff Koons and
Katharina Fritsch,
whose work marks
a shift back to figurative sculpture
after decades of
abstraction.
“Charles Ray is working on a new three-dimensional figuration,” Bürgi says, “and
the show is about the recent developments in his art.”
The first piece, Unpainted
Sculpture, 1997, which is on loan
from the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, exemplifies this
change. For this work, the artist
bought a wrecked Pontiac Grand
Am (around 1991), dismantled it
and cast it piece by piece in fibreglass. He then reassembled the car
in a painstaking process that took
him around two years to complete.
Even though there is no human figure present, it evokes the aftermath
of a lethal car accident. The result is
a “Classical memento mori”, Bürgi
says. “You have the allusion to Death
and Disaster by Andy Warhol, but it
is not so much a story about
death as it is about sculptural
St Clara, Lindenberg 8,
Wintergarten, 2 Floor/Stock
• Klara Hobza
UNTIL 22 JUNE
www.deuxpiece.com
Dock
Klybeckstrasse 29
UNTIL 2 JULY
Fondation Beyeler
Baselstrasse 101
• Gerhard Richter: Pictures/Series
UNTIL 7 SEPTEMBER
www.fondationbeyeler.ch
Haus für Elektronische
Künste Basel
Oslostrasse 10,
Basel-Münchenstein
• Perspectives on Imaginary Futures
UNTIL 22 JUNE
Klybeckstrasse 1b
• Sophie Jung: HeK@Keck Kiosk
UNTIL 20 JULY
www.haus-ek.org
Kunstforum Baloise
Aeschengraben 21
• Karsten Födinger
UNTIL END OF JULY
www.baloise.com
Kunsthalle Basel
Steinenberg 7
• Naeem Mohaiemen
UNTIL 24 AUGUST
• Julia Rometti and Victor Costales
19 JUNE-24 AUGUST
www.kunsthallebasel.ch
Kunsthaus Baselland
St Jakob-Strasse 170
• Ariel Schlesinger
UNTIL 6 JULY
Go figure: Sleeping Woman, 2012 (above), Unpainted
Sculpture, 1997 (right), and Boy With Frog, 2009
• Sarah Oppenheimer (see p24)
UNTIL 7 SEPTEMBER
• Bianca Pedrina: Cloud Atlas
questions at a formal level, about
materials and weight.”
Aluminum Girl, 2003, is Ray’s
first strictly figurative sculpture.
The standing nude makes reference to Classical sculpture, much
like Boy With Frog, but in this
case, the work is lifesize and
modelled from life (it is based
on the artist Jennifer Pastor).
The work appears to be a marble sculpture made using traditional techniques, but closer
Sleeping Woman, 2012, and Mime, 2014, are
shown side by side. The former shows a
bulky, homeless woman lying on a bench,
dressed in trainers, sweatpants and a
jacket. Art-historical references to sleeping
Venuses spring to mind, but for Ray, the
inspiration came from the shape of a
woman’s body that he encountered on a
walk in Santa Monica. “Instantly I saw a
sculpture, machined from solid metal,”
Ray said. Despite the seemingly uncomfortable pose—the woman’s jacket exposes
her lower back and reveals her lace under-
UNTIL 30 DECEMBER
www.kunsthausbaselland.ch
Kunstmuseum Basel
St Alban-Graben 16
• Kazimir Malevich
UNTIL 22 JUNE
• Imitation and Interpretation:
Creative Illusions in Drawing
and Printmaking
UNTIL 3 AUGUST
• Charles Ray: Sculpture 1997-2014
(see preview)
UNTIL 28 SEPTEMBER
Ray’s work is “a seamless blend of mechanical
reproduction and refined artistic intervention”
www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
Museum der Kulturen Basel
Münsterplatz 20
inspection reveals an accuracy
only made possible by cuttingedge technology. The interplay
between naturalism and idealism, detail and abstraction, tradition and innovation—key elements of Ray’s work—becomes
apparent. The art critic and art
historian Michael Fried says in
the catalogue: “The sculpture as
a whole is a seamless blend of
mechanical reproduction and the
most considered and refined sort
of artistic intervention.”
Two more recent sculptures,
wear—she is in deep sleep. For Ray, “her
sleep had weight”. Mime, on the other
hand, depicts a lighter, more delicate kind
of sleep. The shiny aluminium sculpture
shows a man lying on a camp bed, presumably miming sleep.
Of Ray’s recent works, Bürgi says: “You
can see that he is thinking about the very
long tradition of figurative sculpture, and
somehow, he brings a new approach and a
new experience of the world today.”
Laurie Rojas
• “Charles Ray: Sculpture 1997-2014”,
Kunstmuseum Basel and Museum für
Gegenwartskunst, until 28 September
• The Parrot’s Chest: Folk Art
from Latin America
UNTIL 18 JANUARY 2015
www.mkb.ch
Museum für Gegenwartskunst
St Alban, Rheinweg 60
• Le Corbeau et le Renard: Revolt of
Language with Marcel Broodthaers
(see p24)
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
• Charles Ray: Sculpture 1997-2014
UNTIL 28 SEPTEMBER
www.mgkbasel.ch
CONTINUED ON PAGE 24
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
24
CALENDAR
Art Basel week, 17-22 June
Museum Tinguely
between Von Bartha, Stampa
and Idea Fixa galleries)
Paul Sacher-Anlage 2
• Kristof Kintera: I Am Not You
UNTIL 28 SEPTEMBER
www.tinguely.ch
SOLOTHURN
Kunstmuseum Solothurn
Kunsthaus Zürich
UNTIL 22 JUNE
Werkhofstrasse 30
• Antoine Bourdelle: Sappho
www.3-6-1.ch
• Silvie Defraoui
UNTIL 6 JULY
UNTIL 3 AUGUST
www.kunstmuseum-so.ch
• Cindy Sherman: Untitled Horrors
(see box)
• The Torches of Prometheus:
Henry Fuseli and Javier Téllez
From the threatening to the grotesque
쏍Hebel_121
UNTIL 14 SEPTEMBER
Hebelstrasse 121
Salts
Heimplatz 1
• David Tremlett
Hauptstrasse 12, Birsfelden
UNTIL 2 AUGUST
ST GALLEN
Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen
• Picture This: Group Show by Salts
and Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen with
Emanuel Röhss, Fredrik Vaerslev,
Amanda Ross-Ho and Navid Nuur
www.hebel121.org
Davidstrasse 40
20 JUNE-12 OCTOBER
• Carter Mull, Tobias Kaspar
www.kunsthaus.ch
19 JUNE-17 JULY
• Trace: Rut Himmelsbach
쏍John Schmid Galerie
UNTIL 13 JULY
St Alban Anlage 67
• Katja Novitskova
UNTIL 16 AUGUST
19 JUNE-17 JULY
www.johnschmidgalerie.ch
• In the Printed Room:
Read the Room/You've Got To
쏍Laleh June Galerie
19 JUNE-17 JULY
www.salts.ch
Ruchfeldstrasse 19
• Mark Rembold
• Augustin Rebetez
www.lalehjune.com
www.schaulager.org
• Alexander Zschokke
UNTIL 31 JULY
www.puechredon.com
• Ramon Feller, Jan Hostettler,
Matthias Liechti: Gap
쏍Nicolas Krupp
Contemporary Art
UNTIL 21 JUNE
Rosentalstrasse 28
www.schwarzwaldallee.ch
• Heimo Zobernig
• Fritz Haller
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
Museum für Gestaltung
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Horrors Kunsthaus Zürich
• U5: Parasite
Ausstellungsstrasse 60
UNTIL 14 SEPTEMBER
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
• Weingart Typography
The Kunsthaus Zürich is holding the city’s first major solo exhibition of
the US artist Cindy Sherman. More than 100 photographs from various
stages of Sherman’s career are on show, dealing with issues of identity
and gender. As the title suggests, the exhibition surveys threatening
and grotesque imagery alongside “Untitled” photographs, ranging from
her earlier series of “Untitled Film Stills”, 1977-80, through to later work
such as “Clowns”, 2003-04 (above, Untitled #420, 2004). F.P.
www.kunstmuseumthun.ch
• Sofia Hultén
www.nicolaskrupp.com
UNTIL 27 JULY
UNTIL 20 JULY
UNTIL 26 OCTOBER
www.raebervonstenglin.com
www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch
www.ville-ge.ch
www.kmw.ch
LAUSANNE
Musée Cantonal
des Beaux-Arts
Kunsthalle Winterthur
Schweizerisches
Landesmuseum
Marktgasse 25
Museumstrasse 2
• Konrad Smolenski
• Swiss Press Photo 14
Palais de Rumine,
Place de la Riponne 6
UNTIL 27 JULY
UNTIL 6 JULY
www.kunsthallewinterthur.ch
www.kunsthalle-bern.ch
• Magical Russian Landscapes:
Masterpieces from the State
Tretyakov Gallery
• From 1900 to 1914:
Expedition to Happiness
ZURICH
Haus Konstruktiv
UNTIL 5 OCTOBER
Selnaustrasse 25
• 100 Years of William S. Burroughs
Kunstmuseum Bern
www.beaux-arts.vd.ch
• Delphine Chapuis-Schmitz
21 JUNE-21 DECEMBER
UNTIL 19 JULY
Hodlerstrasse 12
UNTIL 7 SEPTEMBER
www.musee-suisse.ch
www.vonbartha.com
• Bill Viola: Passions
쏍Stampa
• Projects 5: Drawing 1970-2013
• Vern Blosum
Zip
UNTIL 30 AUGUST
UNTIL 3 AUGUST
Wettsteinallee 71
www.stampa-galerie.ch
• Revelry
Spalenberg 2
UNTIL 22 JUNE
쏍Von Bartha Garage
www.ausstellungsraum-zip.
blogspot.ch
Kannenfeldplatz 6
EXHIBITIONS
• Mark Tobey, Julius Bissier,
Yves Dana
UNTIL 22 JUNE
UNTIL 3 AUGUST
UNTIL 26 JULY
UNTIL 13 JULY
• Archaeology: Treasures from
the Swiss National Museum
LIESTAL
Kunsthalle Palazzo
www.hauskonstruktiv.ch
UNTIL 20 JULY
www.kunstmuseumbern.ch
Poststrasse 2
Kunsthalle Zürich
Rote Fabrik, Seestrasse 395
• From the Palazzo…
• Drawing Protest: from Museum
Walls to Facebook Walls and Back
Shedhalle
Zentrum Paul Klee
UNTIL 22 JUNE
Löwenbräukunst,
Limmatstrasse 270
SWITZERLAND
Monument im Fruchtland 3
www.palazzo.ch
• Slavs and Tatars (see box)
UNTIL 7 SEPTEMBER
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
• Haim Steinbach
AARAU
Aargauer Kunsthaus
UNTIL 22 JUNE
LUCERNE
Kunstmuseum Luzern
• How We Want to Live:
Collective Battles for Care Work
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
UNTIL 7 SEPTEMBER
www.zpk.org
Europaplatz 1
www.kunsthallezurich.ch
www.shedhalle.ch
GENEVA
Cabinet d’Arts Graphiques
• Into the Open: Landscape
Painting of Robert Zund and
Ferdinand Hodler to Mox von Moos
FURTHER AFIELD
쏍Galerie Carzaniga
Gemsberg 8
Pfingstweidstrasse 23,
Welti-Furrer Areal
• Return to Life: Portrait Busts
from the Collections
Helvetiaplatz 1
www.annemoma.com
쏍RaebervonStenglin
• Humanising War? The ICRC:
150 Years of Humanitarian Action
UNTIL 30 AUGUST
UNTIL 19 JULY
UNTIL 27 JULY
UNTIL 10 AUGUST
www.museum-gestaltung.ch
Everything: Robert Walser and
the Visual Arts
• Jonas Burkhalter: Perennial
• Michelle Grabner
• Gerhard Richter
UNTIL 28 SEPTEMBER
• Melchior Imboden:
Designer Portraits
UNTIL 28 JUNE
UNTIL 24 AUGUST
Malzgasse 20
Museumstrasse 52
UNTIL 27 JULY
www.sam-basel.org
쏍 Anne Mosseri-Marlio
Galerie
WINTERTHUR
Kunstmuseum Winterthur
• Fred Sandback: Drawings
BERN
Kunsthalle Bern
• Burst Sculpture
• Teresa Margolles: Search
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
St Johanns-Vorstadt 78
Steinenberg 7
Thunerhof, Hofstettenstrasse 14
www.migrosmuseum.ch
UNTIL 19 OCTOBER
Schweizerisches
Architekturmuseum
Löwenbräukunst,
Limmatstrasse 270
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
쏍Marc de Puechredon
Voltastrasse 41
THUN
Kunstmuseum Thun
Picassoplatz 4
• Paul Chan: Selected Works
Schwarzwaldallee
Migros Museum für
Gegenwartskunst
• Marcel Dzama: Hollow Laughter
19 JUNE-31 JULY
Schaulager
www.k9000.ch
• The Journey to Tunisia:
Klee, Macke, Moilliet
Aargauplatz
• Paying No Attention, I Notice
www.carzaniga.ch
Poetry in motion
LUMA Westbau/Pool
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire,
5 Promenade du Pin
UNTIL 23 NOVEMBER
Löwenbräukunst,
Limmatstrasse 270
www.kunstmuseumluzern.ch
• In the Crack of the Dawn
• Satires: 18th-Century Caricatures
from Geneva and England
쏍Galerie Urs Meile
www.poolproject.net
UNTIL 12 JULY
UNTIL 31 AUGUST
Rosenberghöhe 4
www.galerielinder.ch
www.ville-ge.ch/mah
• Shao Fan: Face to Face
쏍Barbarian Art Gallery
UNTIL 5 JULY
Promenadengasse 19
www.galerie-meile.ch
• Antagonisms: Rearte and Tishin
St Alban-Vorstadt 52
Centre d’Art
Contemporain Geneve
• Scottie Wilson: Outsider Art
10, Rue des Vieux-Grenadiers
www.barbarian-art.com
UNTIL 28 JUNE
• Joachim Koester
MARTIGNY
Fondation Pierre Gianadda
쏍Galerie Gisèle Linder
Elisabethenstrasse 54
Dealing with
distance
• Peter Wüthrich
쏍Galerie Hilt
www.galeriehilt.ch
UNTIL 21 JUNE
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
Rue du Forum 59
• Andrea Bruno: Cinema Zenit
• Renoir
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
20 JUNE-30 NOVEMBER
www.centre.ch
www.gianadda.ch
UNTIL 28 JUNE
Martin Bodmer Foundation
www.idea-fixa.com
19-21 Route du Guignard
NEUCHATEL
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire
• Alexandria the Divine
Esplanade Léopold Robert 1
UNTIL 31 AUGUST
• China Shop
www.fondationbodmer.ch
UNTIL 24 AUGUST
쏍Galerie Idea Fixa
Feldbergstrasse 38
• Veraath: Oliver Rath
쏍Galerie Karin Sutter
Oppenheimer’s 33-D, 2014
Rebgasse 2
• I Love Art from Berlin
Sarah Oppenheimer
UNTIL SEPTEMBER
Kunsthaus Baselland
Musée Ariana
UNTIL 7 SEPTEMBER
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire,
Avenue de la Paix 10
RIEHEN
Kunst Raum Riehen
• Ceramics of Islam: the Ariana
Selects from its Storerooms II
Berowergut Baselstrasse 71
www.galeriekarinsutter.ch
쏍Galerie Mäder
Claragraben 45
• Heike Müller: Scottish Orange
UNTIL 28 JUNE
www.galeriemaeder.ch
쏍Galerie von Bartha
Schertlingasse 16
• Bernar Venet
UNTIL 19 JULY
www.vonbartha.com
쏍Güterhalle St Johann
Vogesenplatz 1
• 3+6=1 (a collaboration
Sarah Oppenheimer gets her
first institutional show in Europe
during Art Basel, and she has
created a major new work, 33-D,
for the Kunsthaus Baselland.
Through a combination of architecture and sculpture, the New
York-based artist transforms the
gallery’s exhibition space. In
one large room measuring 40m
long and around 4.5m high,
Oppenheimer plays with actual
and perceived distances using
aluminium, glass, light and the
existing architecture. F.P.
www.mahn.ch
UNTIL 31 AUGUST
www.ville-ge.ch/ariana
• Analog, Dialog: Anita
Neugebauer’s Photography
Collection
UNTIL 6 JULY
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire
www.kunstraumriehen.ch
Rue Charles-Galland 2
• Rodin: the Accident and
the Random
RIGGISBERG
Abegg-Stiftung
20 JUNE-28 SEPTEMBER
Werner Abegg Strasse 67
www.ville-ge.ch/mah
• Veil and Adornment:
Medieval Textiles and the
Cult of Relics
Musée Rath
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire,
Place Neuve 1
UNTIL 14 SEPTEMBER
UNTIL 9 NOVEMBER
www.abegg-stiftung.ch
쏍Galerie Andrea Caratsch
Broodthaers’s Un jardin
d’hiver (ABC), 1974
Le Corbeau et Le Renard:
Revolt of Language
Museum für Gegenwartskunst
UNTIL 17 AUGUST
Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76)
was a poet before he turned to
fine art in his 40s. His references
to other poet-artists such as
Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles
Baudelaire and René Magritte
indicate that the Belgian artist
never lost his interest in poetry
and language. At the Museum für
Gegenwartskunst, seven films
from the collection of the
Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation
explore the relationship between
visual art and poetry in his work.
The show’s curator, Søren
Grammel, has included works by
Hans Arp, Robert Barry, Alighiero
Boetti, László Moholy-Nagy and
Dieter Roth to provide a context
for Broodthaers's work. L.R.
Waldmannstrasse 8
• Warhol, Lichtenstein,
Wesselmann
UNTIL 25 JULY
www.galeriecaratsch.com
쏍Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Limmatstrasse 270
• Valentin Carron: Ciao Muddy Plain
UNTIL 19 JULY
• Carol Dunham
UNTIL 19 JULY
• Michael Williams: New Paintings
UNTIL 19 JULY
www.presenhuber.com
쏍Galerie Francesca Pia
Löwenbräukunst,
Limmatstrasse 268
• Thomas Bayrle: Vespini
UNTIL 12 JULY
www.francescapia.com
쏍Galerie Gmurzynska
Paradeplatz 2
• The Haas Brothers: Feinstein
UNTIL JULY
www.gmurzynska.com
SHERMAN: © CINDY SHERMAN; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK. OPPENHEIMER: INSTALLATION VIEW, KUNSTHAUS BASELLAND, 2014; PHOTO: SERGE HASENBÖHLER. BROODTHAERS: KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
Not lost in translation
ART BASEL EVENTS
THURSDAY 19 JUNE
Performance
Hall 3, Messe Basel
14 Rooms
The power of language is explored in Slavs and Tartars’ show
Slavs and Tartars: Lektor Kunsthalle Zurich UNTIL 17 AUGUST
The art collective Slavs and Tatars, who devote their work to “the area
east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China”, have
created the audio work Lecturer, along with a series of events. Lecturer
comprises a voice reading extracts from a Medieval poem with a voiceover in German, which illustrates the dependence language has on translation. Another work exploring the power of speech and language is
Mother Tongues & Father Throats, 2012 (above), a carpet depicting a diagram of Arabic letters with corresponding illustrations of a mouth pronouncing them. F.P.
10AM-7PM
Co-organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist
and Klaus Biesenbach.
Parcours
Meeting point: Hall 1 entrance,
guided tours reception
10AM-10PM. GERMAN TOURS: 2PM &
4PM; ENGLISH TOURS: 2PM & 5.30PM
Site-specific works, organised by
Florence Derieux, the director of
FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.
Conversations
Hall 1 auditorium, Messe Basel
쏍Galerie Haas AG
Musée des Beaux-Arts
Talstrasse 62a
• Dimitris Tzamouranis: Tarot
Villa Steinbach,
Place Guillaume Tell 4
UNTIL 25 JULY
• Plural Identities
www.galeriehaasag.ch
UNTIL 24 AUGUST
www.kunsthallemulhouse.fr
Salon
UNTIL 31 AUGUST
쏍Galerie Mark Müller
Hafnerstrasse 44
La Kunsthalle
• Katherina Grosse: the Ball
Rue de la Fonderie 16
UNTIL 26 JULY
• Transpositions
쏍Galerie Nicola von
Senger AG
Löwenbräukunst,
Limmatstrasse 275
• Mario Sala: Cells
UNTIL 21 JUNE
www.nicolavonsenger.com
Hall 1 auditorium, Messe Basel
STRASBOURG
Musée Alsacien
1PM–2PM
• Reminiscences: Design,
Alsace, Tradition
Josh Baer, the publisher of Baer
Faxt, in conversation with the collector David Mugrabi.
14 Rooms: Living Sculptures
UNTIL 20 OCTOBER
쏍Galerie Peter Kilchmann
2PM-3PM
• Erika Verzutti: Painted Ladies
Musée Archéologique
de Strasbourg
UNTIL 19 JULY
Palais Rohan, Place du Château 2
www.peterkilchmann.com
• East of New
쏍Hauser & Wirth Zürich
www.musees-strasbourg.org
Löwenbräukunst,
Limmatstrasse 270
UNTIL 31 DECEMBER
The author Bernard Comment in
conversation with Hans Ulrich
Obrist, the co-director of the
Serpentine Galleries, London.
Art History: 100 Years of the
Readymade
3PM-4PM
• Mark Bradford
Musée d’Art Moderne
et Contemporain
UNTIL 26 JULY
Place Hans Arp 1
• Louise Bourgeois
• Clement Cogitore: Fictions
With Anne-Marie Bonnet, professor
of art history at the University of
Bonn, Thomas Girst, BMW Group’s
head of cultural engagement, and
the artist Mathieu Mercier.
Unlimited: Turning Space
Into Place
UNTIL 26 JULY
UNTIL 29 SEPTEMBER
www.hauserwirth.com
www.musees.strasbourg.eu
쏍Mai 36 Galerie
Musée des Beaux-Arts
4PM-5PM
Rämistrasse 37
Palais Rohan,
Place du Château 2
With the artists Sam Falls, Gavin
Kenyon, Nick Mauss and Alex
Prager. Moderated by Gianni
Jetzer, the curator of Art Basel’s
Unlimited sector.
Read the Room: a Poetry Reading
• Thomas Ruff: New Work
www.mai36.com
• Civic Guard of Saint Adrian
de Cornelis Engelsz
쏍Scheublein Fine Art
www.musee-strasbourg.org
Castle Sihlberg, Sihlberg 10
GERMANY
UNTIL 2 AUGUST
• Edward Burtynsky: Water
UNTIL 2 NOVEMBER
UNTIL 25 JULY
www.scheubleinfineart.com
쏍Thomas Ammann Fine Art
BADEN-BADEN
Museum Frieder Burda
Lichtentaler Allee 8b
5PM-6PM
With the poets and writers Harry
Burke, Andrew Durbin, Paul Kneale,
Quinn Latimer, Megan Rooney and
Martina-Sofie Wildberger.
Artist Talk: Berlin Biennale
Restelbergstrasse 97
• JR
6PM-7PM
• Enoc Perez: New Paintings
and Sculpture
UNTIL 29 JUNE
www.ammannfineart.com
Staatliche Kunsthalle
With Juan Gaitan, the curator of
the eighth Berlin Biennale for
Contemporary Art, and the artist
Beatriz Gonzalez.
FRANCE
Lichtentaler Allee 8a
Film
• Room Service
Stadtkino Basel, Klostergasse 5
UNTIL 22 JUNE
Short film programme:
Spatial Explorations
www.museum-frieder-burda.de
UNTIL 26 SEPTEMBER
COLMAR
Espace d’Art Contemporain
André Malraux
SLAVS AND TARTARS: PHOTO: BERNARD KAHRMANN; COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS AND KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER, BERLIN
Art Market: Investment?
Collecting? Speculations?
Quai Saint-Nicolas 23
www.musees.strasbourg.eu
Zahnradstrasse 21
10AM-11.30AM
With RoseLee Goldberg, the founding director and curator of
Performa in New York, the artist
Otobong Nkanga and Catherine
Wood, the curator of contemporary art and performance at Tate
Modern, London. Moderated by
the New York-based author and
cultural consultant András Szántó.
www.musees-mulhouse.fr
www.markmueller.ch
Public/Private: Institutions for
Time-Based Art
Rue Rapp 4
• Secret Gardens,
with Mitsuo Shirishi
www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de
8PM-9PM
FREIBURG
Morat-Institut
Lörracher Strasse 31
• 30 Years of the Morat-Institut
UNTIL 26 JUNE
UNTIL 31 DECEMBER
www.colmar.fr/culture
www.morat-institut.de
Musée d’Unterlinden
Museum für Neue Kunst
Rue d’Unterlinden 1
Marienstrasse 10a
• Recent Archaeological
Excavations from the
Sainte-Croix-en-Plaine
Necropolis
• Heike Beyer
UNTIL 23 JUNE
WEIL AM RHEIN
Vitra Design Museum
“At the House of Mr X”, Elizabeth
Price, 2007; “The Republic”, David
Hartt, 2014; and “Stray Light”,
David Hartt, 2011.
Short Film programme:
Relating To
10PM-11PM
www.musee-unterlinden.com
UNTIL 22 JUNE
www.freiburg.de/museen
Charles-Eames-Strasse 1
MULHOUSE
La Filature
• Alvaro Siza: the
Alhambra Project
Allée Nathan Katz 20
UNTIL 31 AUGUST
• Bal People
• Konstantin Grcic: Panorama
UNTIL 29 JUNE
UNTIL 14 SEPTEMBER
www.lafilature.org
www.design-museum.de
“Samuel in Space”, Rashid
Johnson, 2013; “Silver and Gold”,
Sue de Beer, 2011; “Room 309”, Sue
de Beer, 2011; “The Chief Architect
of Gangsta Rap”, Ilja Karilampi,
2009; “Dad's Stick”, John Smith,
2012; “Washing Brain and Corn”,
Sung Hwan Kim, 2010; “Before
Falling Asleep Part 2: Two Pigeons”,
Cheng Ran, 2013; and “Dihedral”,
Sterling Ruby, 2006.
Followed by a Q&A with Ilja
Karilampi, John Smith and
Marc Glöde.
25
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL DAILY EDITION 19 June 2014
26
DIARY
Perhaps it was the
raunchy works on show
that prompted two guests
at the breakfast viewing
for the Schaulager’s Paul
Chan exhibition to reveal that,
according to their experience, it is
the seemingly staid Art Basel, rather
than its party-centric Miami Beach
sister, that triggers the most outrageously libidinous behaviour. “You’re
on the stand looking out; it’s such a
good-looking crowd and people get
completely over-excited,” declares the
dashing Rome-based dealer and
Michael Fassbender lookalike Lorcan
O’Neill. “You can almost smell the
pheromones in the Kunsthalle bar
after midnight.” Chris Kneale, the
director of Martinspeed art handlers,
agrees. “Yes, everyone scores in Basel.
When my guys get back home,
there’s a definite surge in penicillin
shares,” he says.
Glow-in-the-dark art
All was going splendidly at Tina
Brown’s exclusive, Credit Suissesponsored conversation with Matthew
Barney (above) at the Kunstmuseum,
until the effusive media doyenne
asked the famously idiosyncratic
artist—whose epic work “River of
Fundament” makes its Swiss debut at
Theater Basel this week—whether
there was any artistic material that he
was “particularly dying to work with”.
As the silence that greeted this seemingly innocuous question stretched
from seconds into excruciating minutes, there was a palpable frisson of
unease among the elite audience,
which included Eli
Broad, Dasha
Zhukova, Klaus
Biesenbach and
Jacques Herzog. Even
the normally unfazeable Ms Brown looked
a bit rattled. The general
disquiet was not greatly
alleviated when Barney brought
his heavily pregnant pause to an end
with a single word: “Radiation.” Will
Geiger counters now become the next
must-have art accessory?
Plein-air poll
As is evinced by his daily survey on
these very pages, the artist who goes
by the name of Bob and Roberta
Smith has been eliciting some
impressive responses from the great
and the good for his Art Party
Questionnaire. However, Bob & Rob’s
dedication to the cause of art education is not restricted to the upper echelons. His residency in Basel has sent
him down to the edge of the Rhine to
ask local swimmers (such as Franz
and Kurt, shown below with the
artist) if they were taught art at
school and if they think studying art
is valuable. The response from all the
waterborne Basellanders canvassed so
far has been a resounding “yes”.
Artoon by Pablo Helguera
ART BASEL DAILY EDITION
No one’s idea of a picnic
While strolling through the public art installations in Parcours this week,
spare a thought for Johannes Ernst, an artist’s assistant who certainly drew the
short straw when he was put in charge of Darren Bader’s piece The Gardeners
in Paradise, in the Bürgerliches Waisenhaus orphanage and youth centre.
Along with a leaf blower that puffs out air from an open window and a lawn
mower that stirs the contents of a giant teacup, Bader’s piece also involves a
grass trimmer that noxiously and messily chops up a car boot loaded with
increasingly rancid spaghetti alla bottarga. For the less gastronomically aware,
the main ingredient of this pasta dish is salted fish roe, which was chosen by
the artist to match the vehicle’s leather upholstery, but with little consideration for the consequences of three days of exposure to the Swiss sunshine.
ART
PARTY
QUESTIONNAIRE
NICHOLAS
SEROTA
What first inspired you to get involved in art? I remember the first exhibition my father took me to at Tate when I was 14:
Picasso. My father often visited museums, and occasionally galleries, but couldn’t understand why anyone would study art. I had a very inspiring art teacher at
school, who had complete conviction about the importance of art in education.
While studying economics at university, I decided to use the flexibility of the
course to get into art history—and I knew this move would stay with me for the
rest of my life.
EDITORIAL AND PRODUCTION
Editor (The Art Newspaper): Jane Morris
Editors (fair papers): Javier Pes, Pas Paschali
Deputy editor: Helen Stoilas
Production editor: Ria Hopkinson
Copy editors: James Hobbs, Andrew McIlwraith,
Iain Millar, Emily Sharpe, Simon Stephens
Designer: Craig Gaymer
Picture researchers: Katherine Hardy,
Laurie Rojas
Editorial assistants: Pac Pobric, Laurie Rojas
Editorial researcher: Victoria Stapley-Brown
Contributors: Georgina Adam, Martin Bailey,
Louisa Buck, Charlotte Burns, Benjamin Eastham,
Melanie Gerlis, Julia Halperin, Gareth Harris, Julia
Michalska, Iain Millar, Pas Paschali, Javier Pes,
Pac Pobric, Francesca Price, Ermanno Rivetti,
Laurie Rojas, Cristina Ruiz, Anny Shaw, Toby
Skeggs, Helen Stoilas, Nicole Swengley
Photographer: David Owens
DIRECTORS AND PUBLISHING
Publisher: Umberto Allemandi
Chief executive: Anna Somers Cocks
Managing director: James Knox
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SPAGHETTI: © DAVID OWENS. BARNEY: DAVID BIEDERT/DAVIDBIEDERT.COM
It’s always
the quiet ones
25 varieties of powder paint
Everywhere is Art
Try taking a second look
That is what artists do. They look beyond
the expected, often finding inspiration in
surprising places. At UBS, we apply a similar
kind of attitude to everything we do. It is
through this search for deeper meaning that
we are able to discover new and interesting
perspectives. These, in turn, allow us to
uncover new investment opportunities for
our clients.
It is in this spirit that we support Art Basel
in Basel, Miami Beach and Hong Kong –
the premier art shows for modern and
contemporary works. It is just another way
of showing that everywhere is, in fact, art.
UBS is the global Lead Partner of Art Basel.
ubs.com/art
© UBS 2014. All rights reserved.