Helen Molesworth.
Molesworth, Helen
1 ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW (HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES; CU RATED BY ELENA FILIPOVIC AND JOANNA MYTKOWSKA) This was one of the most exciting bodies
of work I've seen in a longtime. Mouths, boobs, lightbulbs, limbs,
marble, plastic--the exhibition, organized here by Allegra Pesenti,
proceeded from a classic post--World War II account of the human form,
shot through with existentialism and horror, to something darkly
playful, a sculptural reckoning with the exigencies and absurdities of
survival. The Polish artist, who died of cancer in 1973 at the age of
forty-seven, made visible the ways in which the body is both ours and
not ours, a fact never more evident than when facing illness and death.
We exist for others, and Szapocznikow's work shows us how
heartbreaking that is.
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Co-organized with Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels; the
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2 NICOLE EISENMAN (WHITNEY BIENNIAL, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN
ART, NEW YORK) Eisenman's wall of portraits was the standout of
this year's Biennial. Was it their unrelenting gaze? During a
period when the US military has killed an unknown number of civilians in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely through the use of unmanned drones,
these searching faces--handmade, expressive evocations of an encounter
between artist and sitter--spoke, perhaps, to a need to return to some
humanist basics. They did so through the infinite reproducibility of the
print, demonstrating Eisenman's conceptual rigor as well as her
wonderful draftsmanship.
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3 "UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN: CALIFORNIA ART 1974-4981"
(THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES;
CU RATED BY PAUL SCHIMMEL) Schimmel's survey of post-Watergate West
Coast Conceptualism was bracketed by two modes of the mendacity that
characterize contemporary power. Opening with the thirty-seventh
president's resignation letter allowed the curator to summon the
Nixonian legacy of lying and subterfuge, while the repeated images of
Reagan homed in on the spec-tacularized, Hollywood version of populist
falsehoods. It's hard not to see the exhibition in retrospect as a
warning to the public about what was to come (Schimmel's ouster in
the name of the "popular") and a riposte to the men who
currently hold power at MOCA (Jeffrey Deitch and Eli Broad).
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4 WILLIAM KENTRIDGE'S NORTON LECTURES (HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
CAMBRIDGE, MA) Harvard's corporate slogan, Veritas, helps to
explain its notoriously difficult relationship to contemporary art. This
spring, a different breeze blew across campus as William Ken-tridge gave
a series of six lectures called "Drawing Lessons," each
dedicated to a topic such as the studio, colonialism, or anti-entropy.
As he paced the stage, he read from a notebook while behind him a
projection of drawings, animations, notations, and music unfolded. The
talks constituted a plea to salvage the humanist dimensions of the
Enlightenment project, while staring down that project's abuses by
denying the omnipotence of a universal truth.
5 TINO SEHGAL, THIS VARIATION (DOCUMENTA 13, KASSEL) You stumbled
(literally) into a room so dark you couldn't see your hand before
your face. Sounds emerged--shuffling, breathing, whispering, all manner
of air being pushed in all manner of ways from all manner of mouths.
Slowly, the piece cohered; performers mingled with the audience,
dancing, walking, singing, stomping, sitting, clapping, falling,
reveling in the syncopated rhythms and staggering variety of
Mclean-American popular music. It had no beginning, no end; you could
stay all day. The performers were on point, displaying a combination of
James Brown--like exactitude and Cagean chance operations. It made the
trip across the ocean (in economy) worth it.
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6 LYNNE COOKE'S INSTALLATION OF "BLINKY PALERMO:
RETROSPECTIVE 1964-1977" (DIA:BEACON, BEACON, NY; AND CCS GALLERIES
AT BARD COLLEGE, ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY) Cooke's installation at
Bard bowled me over. She thought through every segue, making the
exhibition a series of visual connections that magisterially worked in
both directions--no entrance or exit was privileged. It was an exercise
in the spatial-ization of parity.
7 CINDY SHERMAN'S WALLPAPER (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK)
Sherman's foray into wallpaper is, for me, a near Brechtian
exercise in affect: Laugh or cry? Alone, misshapen, melancholic, Sherman
offers herself as a Pierrot for the twenty-first century. If
Watteau's fetes galantes were covert critiques of an aristocracy
run amok, in which the artist was imagined as a kind of decorator-clown,
then Sherman's wallpaper intimates that decades of feminism have
resulted in modest gains in a game whose rules remain dishearteningly
unchanged.
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8 BILL HORRIGAN ON CHRIS MARKER Marker passed away this year, and
the only good thing about that was reading Horrigan's reflections
in the days that followed. As a media curator at the Wexner Center for
the Arts (and, full disclosure, my former colleague), Horrigan organized
several exhibitions of the director's work, but the substance of
the two men's relationship was a steady old-fashioned
correspondence, one Marker peppered with photographs and drawings.
Writing about these exchanges on the Wexner Center's blog, Horrigan
insisted that Marker was not an antisocial recluse. An aversion to being
photographed or socializing en masse does not a misanthrope make.
Intimacy and friendship come in many forms; long live the epistolary
mode.
9 "EVERYTHING FALLS APART, PART 1" (ARTSPACE, SYDNEY;
CURATED BY MARK FEARY AND BLAIR FRENCH) A pointed rejoinder to the
feel-good globalism of this year's Biennale of Sydney, the first
installment of this two-part show (I didn't see the second) was
dominated by Occupy--Sarah Goffman's remade signs and Jem
Cohen's appropriately scrappy films of the activities in Zuccotti
Park. Rather than presenting an affect of false optimism or cynical
reason, "Everything Falls Apart" offered a much-needed history
lesson: As Phil Collins's marxism today (prologue), 2010, reminded
us, the fall of the Soviet Union left in its wake not only a global
power vacuum filled by the US war machine but a slow ebbing away in the
academy of a commitment to teaching alternatives to US hegemony, perhaps
resulting in a dearth of rigorous structural thinking about what makes
the current financial crisis so profitable for the 1 percent.
10 "NOW DIG THIS ART AND BLACK LOS ANGELES 1960-1980"
(HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES; CURATED BY KELLIE JONES) This show had it
all: the ascent of Los Angeles as a postwar art center, the recognition
of performance as a structural element of contemporary art, and gender
parity. Additionally, it introduced me to lesser-known artists (Noah
Purifoy) while reframing well-known ones (David Hammons). But mostly I
loved the deeply intelligent narrative arc provided by Jones. She showed
us--visually, conceptually, historically--how we got from the
race-positive imagery of master printer Charles White to the funky
exploration of the body offered by Senga Nengudi, all the while
insisting that no story of twentieth-century art is anywhere near
complete without acknowledging the centrality of art made by African
Americans.
Helen Molesworth is the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute
of Contemporary Art, Boston, where her exhibition "This Will Have
Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s" is on view through
March 3. She is currently organizing Amy Sillman's first museum
survey and working on an exhibition of paintings by Steve Locke.
