art

Marina Abramović and OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu with a model of the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (Photo: OMA / Loren Wohl)

Artist Marina Abramović began her Met Gala Monday in Queens, inside MoMA PS1′s geodesic Performance Dome, where she detailed her plans to transform a crumbling old theater in Hudson, New York into the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation for Performance Art (MAI for short). Hours later, having sharpened up her all-black ensemble, she was striding up the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of the Art on the arm of James Franco. “Today is a big day for me,” she told the morning assembly of press, curators, critics, and friends after a warm introduction by PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach. “In the life of an artist, it’s very important to think of the future. When you die, you can’t leave anything physical—that doesn’t make any sense—but a good idea can last a long, long time.”

Her good idea is to channel 40 years worth of pioneering performance art into a living archive-cum-laboratory that will explore “time-based and immaterial art,” including performance, dance, theater, film, video, opera, and music. The focus will be on “long-duration” performances, those lasting for between six hours and…forever. “Only long-duration works of art have a serious potential to change the viewer looking at it and also the performer in doing it, because the performance that is long becomes more and more like life itself,” she said. “There’s no division between normal daily activity and the performance. This is what I experienced especially at my [2010] performance at MoMA, which was three months long. That really changed me mentally, physically, in many other ways.”

(Rendering: OMA)

Abramović commissioned OMA to transform the crumbling theater that she acquired in 2007 into a space for training artists and audiences alike. “It has an interesting level of decay,” said OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu, pointing out a rotted column and ghostly baselines from the building’s post-theater incarnation as an indoor tennis court. “The project has to house a very specific program of long-duration performance, so the first thing we decided to do was insert a very monastic box inside that can house many things. It’s actually slightly bigger than the tennis court, so you can still play tennis if you wanted to.”
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It’s shaping up to be a spot-on summer. Dot-loving artist Yayoi Kusama is the subject of a retrospective on view through June 5 at Tate Modern. The show arrives stateside, at the Whitney Museum, on July 12, just days before Louis Vuitton debuts a collection of ready-to-wear printed with two Kusama patterns. Vuitton stores around the world will be filled with displays of red and white spotted tentacles created by the artist, who recently celebrated her eighty-third birthday. Wallpaper* is right on the dot with this cover of its June issue, on newsstands today (subscribers received the limited-edition Kusuma cover, which is otherwise available only at newsstands in Japan). The photo shows Kusama at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, where she stands with one of her favorite works, “With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever” (2011), a trio of dot-covered tulip sculptures. The artist has personalized the cover with a “message of love” to Wallpaper* readers along with her Gustonian doodles.

A couple of centuries ago, when the Revolutionary War was in full swing, the British commandeered a patch of farmland in the East River and used it to launch amphibious attacks on Manhattan. Today we know it as Randall’s Island, and a new crop of Brits have seized it for friendly, aboveground purposes: an international contemporary art fair. The first edition of Frieze New York opens Friday in Randall’s Island Park. Nearly 200 galleries will showcase works inside a light-infused temporary structure designed by New York-based Solid Objectives–Indeburg Liu (SO–IL).

“We build a very big fair and to try and find a spot for it isn’t easy,” Frieze New York co-director Amanda Sharp tells us. “It has to be a space that is accessible, that has a little bit of romance and panache about it, that feels in tune with the idea that perhaps Frieze is more of an innovation.” Determined to avoid setting up shop in a hangar on the Hudson, Sharp and co-director Matthew Slotover scouted fresh locales, including one they had never heard of: Randall’s Island. “I go out there, I get out there very easily, and I’m basically standing on the river, in this beautiful open green space, looking back at this fantastic view,” says Sharp, who also discovered “a bit of grittiness” reminiscent of ’70s New York and films such as The French Connection, which was shot on the island. “So it is unknown, but oddly enough, it’s very familiar. It has a little bit of magic about it, and that’s what we were looking for,” she adds. “If you build a fair with really good galleries, I assume that really good collectors will come because they like to see good art, but if you make it an event, perhaps you open art up to more people, and that really excites me.”

Above: A rendering of the fair’s temporary structure. (Courtesy SO–IL and Frieze New York)

“There may be only one designer more absolute in her confidence than [Miuccia] Prada: her fellow-honoree at the Costume Institute. [Elsa] Schiaparelli did more than any of her peers to promote fashion’s status as an art, and she would no doubt have found it natural to mingle at the Met with Phidias and Vermeer. Prada’s statements about art suggest that she must find her own enshrinement somewhat ironic. Her fortune has financed an adventurous private collection, an exhibition space outside Milan, and a foundation that supports cultural experiments. In 2010, she was invited to present the Turner Prize at Tate Britain, partially in recognition of her prominence as a patron. (She wore a pair of plastic banana earrings with a stark black coat.) She has also worked with the Dutch architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas on the design of her major retail spaces, which she calls ‘epicenters,’ in New York and Los Angeles. Yet Prada insists that her vocation and her avocation are unrelated. She has refused to collaborate on limited editions of Prada merchandise with any of the art stars in her collection. (‘Anything that doesn’t sell,’ she once said dryly, ‘is a limited edition.’) In her somewhat heretical view of a profession that often hankers after transcendence, fashion design may be a creative enterprise, concerned, as art is, with culture and identity, but it isn’t what artists do.”

-Judith Thurman in “Radical Chic,” her New Yorker preview of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s imminent spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations”

Above: Elsa Schiaparelli in a 1932 portrait by George Hoyningen-Huené and Miuccia Prada photographed by Guido Harari in 1999. (Photos: Hoyningen-Huené/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive and Guido Harari/Contrasto/Redux)

Call a somnambulance. The multimedia goodness of the Sleepwalkers box.

Doug Aitken is up to his old tricks: enveloping museums in high-definition video projections that illuminate their facades and mesmerize passersby, which in the case of his latest project may include President Obama. The Los Angeles-based artist has transformed the National Mall’s Gordon Bunshaft-designed concrete donut (also known as the Hirshhorn) into a 360-degree convex-screen cinema aglow nightly through May 13 with his “SONG 1.” Meanwhile, the Seattle Art Museum recently commissioned Aitken to wrap a corner—the northwest, bien sûr—of its downtown HQ in a jumbo LED display that will debut early next year. The months between these Washingtonian works provide ample time to savor the Sleepwalkers box, an ultra-covetable multimedia remix of the public artwork that took New York by nocturnal storm in 2007.

Part deluxe commemorative edition, part DIY-spirited artist’s book, the Sleepwalkers box is a bold collaboration between Aitken, the Princeton Architectural Press, and DFA Records. The perforated cardboard cover reveals and conceals a fold-out poster of scenes from the five urban narratives (starring the likes of Donald Sutherland, Tilda Swinton, and Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power) that were projected onto the exterior of the Museum of Modern Art. Set that aside to discover a turntable-ready vinyl “picture disc,” which the strong-willed will manage to avoid framing as an art object. A book of “fragments, markings, and images” from the making of Sleepwalkers includes breathtaking full-bleed images as well as an interview in which Aitken discusses the installation with Jacques Herzog. “Your work needs an ideal architectural conservation to unfold its quality,” advises the architect.
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(Photos courtesy Lisa Perry)

In creating those smashing Roy Lichtenstein shifts, Lisa Perry gave herself a tough act to follow, but when the going gets tough, the tough call Jeff Koons. “He gave us full access to his entire body of work,” says Perry, whose five-year-old label offers a mod mix of clothing, accessories, and homegoods. “It was more inspiration than I could have ever dreamed of!” She selected some of Koons’ greatest hits—including his stainless steel “Rabbit” (1986), the porcelain sculpture that proved to be the Pink Panther’s ticket to Versailles, and the inflatable simian star of “Monkey Train” familiar from Koons-sanctioned beach towels and skate decks—and turned them into a capsule collection of dresses, jackets, handbags, and jewelry. Although a few of the pieces are reminiscent of Stella McCartney’s 2006 collaboration with Koons, a shiny bunny-accented range of chiffon dresses that excerpted canvases from his “EasyFun – Ethereal” series, Perry excels in showcasing details from these same works in fresh ways: the dollop of whipped cream eyed lasciviously by the Trix rabbit in “Loopy” (1999) becomes the cherry-topped bodice of a frothy white shift and pops up again on a colorful bangle. Priced from $150 to $4,500, the collection is now available at Perry’s Madison Avenue shop, which recently moved a few doors down into the corner space previously occupied by the Gagosian Store.

There are benefit auctions and then there are benefit auctions. The one organized by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is of the latter variety, italicized for seriousness of purpose (all dollars earned go to support BAM programs) and seriously covetable art on offer. You have ’til the clock strikes 6:00 p.m. EST on Sunday to bid on the more than 100 works in the eighth edition of the BAMart Silent Auction, for which the organization has partnered with burgeoning online art marketplace Paddle8.com.

With BAM Trustee and megacollector Beth Rudin DeWoody on board as “honorary auction curator,” the 150-year-old performing arts center (America’s oldest) has lined up an eye-popping selection of works, some of which—stunning Pat Steir canvas, we’re looking at you—will move to Phillips as live auction lots. Brooklyn’s own art scene is represented by the likes of Tauba Auerbach, Dustin Yellin, Erik Benson, and Mickalene Thomas, whose “High Priestess in Black Dress” (2011) is a sassy mix of photos, drawings, and vintage wallpaper. Meanwhile, there are plenty of blue-chip works, including those by William Kentridge, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Serra. Stumped for a Mother’s Day gift? Nothing says “I love you” like a “Deadly Fucking Rainbow,” by Michael Scoggins. More traditional types can opt for the Ellsworth Kelly, whose bold lithograph can double as a Romanian flag. And speaking of flags, Maira Kalman offers a charming sea of American versions, in her “2 Million People” (2009-2011).

Pictured: “Baby Jane,” a 2008 watercolor by Mark Chamberlain

“Before microphones and television were invented, a leader had to stand in front of a crowd and bellow,” notes Rick Stengel, managing editor of TIME. “Now [one] can tweet a phrase that reaches millions in a flash. Influence was never ­easier—or more ephemeral.” Which makes the task of selecting TIME‘s list of the 100 most influential people in the world all the trickier. This year’s list, announced today and on newsstands tomorrow in the magazine’s April 30 issue, includes those who have wielded influence through fashion design (Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen), exquisite gadgets (Apple CEO Tim Cook), political cartoons (Ali Ferzat), Nordic cuisine (René Redzepi of Noma), and spandex underthings (Spanx founder Sara Blakely).

Then there’s the influencer who is lauded for his way with time itself: Christian Marclay, creator of the 24-hour cinematic odyssey known as “The Clock.” Geoff Dyer was up to the task of composing a concise yet evocative summary of the video piece, which he describes as stemming from an idea “audacious in its simplicity and herculean in execution.” As for the writer’s own experience of the work—well, it’s something of a chrono-cautionary tale. “During the film’s opening run in London, I had intended to stay long enough to get the gag—10 minutes?—before hurrying on to a lunch date,” writes Dyer. “It was so hypnotic, so thrilling, that I ended up watching 20 hours over a month, arranging life and appointments (for which I was invariably late) in such a way as to catch previously unseen segments of that celluloid epic called a day.”

“Everybody likes objects; everybody likes different objects. It comes down to what objects you want to put in your art. [Jeff] Koons and [Claes] Oldenburg both seem to have their agendas with their objects. So do I, I guess. I like them all: high, low, used, new, whichever works. I don’t know if the Lamp/Bear has anything more to do with Koons or Oldenburg than all three of us and everyone else have to do with [Marcel] Duchamp’s liberation of the real thing. Before him, it seems objects appeared in, or maybe as, still-lives. Duchamp’s the guy, the legend, who liberated objects from being second-class citizens. Even if his greatness lies in our imagination and how he built himself to make us imagine his work as we imagine it. His objects are often not very satisfying to spend time with outside of the fictions he created for them.”

-Artist Urs Fischer, whose solo exhibition at François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi opens Sunday

Ai Weiwei’s “Study of Perspective – Tiananmen” (1995–2003). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Art21 is back with more Art in the Twenty-First Century. The sixth season of the TV series premieres tonight on PBS (check your local listings) with “Change,” an episode featuring documentary profiles of Catherine Opie, El Anatsui, and Ai Weiwei. The latter segment proved particularly challenging to complete, as Chinese authorites arrested Ai midway through filming. He was detained for 81 days (and charged with a $2 million tax bill), and Art21 arranged one of the first on-camera interviews with him after his release. In that conversation, which took place in his Beijing studio, Ai discussed his marble sculpture of a surveillance camera, which, he says is used to “secretly monitor people’s behavior.” “But once it’s marble” he continues, “it’s only being watched. It’s not functioning anymore.” Opie’s camera is always working, and tonight’s episode follows the photographer as she works on projects in Sandusky, Ohio (her childhood hometown) and her current home base of Los Angeles. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, Anatsui and his studio assistants transform old bottle caps into amazing sculptures. Here’s a video sneak peek at the season, which will also feature artists such as Marina Abramović, Glenn Ligon, and Sarah Sze.
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