Throughout Sam Griffin’s latest solo show Corvée at Gallery Vela, the signet architectural and design forms of heroic modernist icons Buckminster Fuller and Le Corbusier echo like sound-bites. Geodesic domes are inverted into plant-pots, the Dymaxion world map turned into a chintzy, chrome and faux-marble Frank Stella inspired logo, and Le Corbusier’s Poeme de L’Angle Droit is greyscaled down in homage to the cult-like, unquestioning compliance of corporate ‘Groupthink’ and collective decision making.

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In 1977, Judith Bernstein made two installation works in the living room and the bedroom of William Copley’s townhouse near the Guggenheim Museum. As she explained “I kept thinking I was going to trash Bill’s place with his extensive Surrealist collection and get the results that Whistler had with his Peacock Room.” The domestic installation included iterations of her massive, iconic, phallus image. The baloneypony appeared iconoclastic and, yet, at the same time integrated with this luxury interior. Now she faces Alex Zachary, a decadent anomaly of a gallery that costumes a breathtaking garden-level, open-air-plan duplex apartment with eighties-modernist architectural embellishments. Bernstein has become most well known for her series of drywall screw-cum-penis drawings she started in 1969. Judith is a pre-nine-eleven feminist who has worked in New York for decades on issues of social subjugation. The drawings, alongside her more articulate collages, intend to empower the subjugated and, simultaneously, critique the dominant form. The massive hardware store dick drawings render the male exclusive object into an abstract form that now appears as a weapon that “draughtswomen” have equal right to bare. At the same time this theolo-totemic “third-leg” appears absurd as a form that holds sway in the distribution of power. Judith has plans for a massive charcoal drawing of her signature that will run across the townhouse gallery. The 1958 movie, “The Horse’ mouth” is projected in the large living-area downstairs. Sir Alec Guinness plays a wild British artist who trashes a patron’s home and winds up having an exhibition at the British Museum. The motion picture should work less as a cinematic ready-made and more at the service of setting the attitudinal register in which to comprehend Judith’s tactile works in the exhibition.

November 10 , 2010 — January 15, 2011
www.alexzachary.com

Many things seem to interest Emily Wardill, and none of them appears to be immediately accessible, which is curious because her work actually seems to be centred on the very tools and modes of transmission of an experience of knowledge. Or rather her works are indeed accessible and intelligible, only not immediate, the sense being caught behind and beneath her dense imaginary and vast universe of references acting as a dismantling force. All of this is striking in this publication that accompany Wardill’s exhibition at the Appel, where the texts are widely deconstructed and the images are not necessarily related to what can–obliquely–read, but are nonetheless instrumental to understanding the richness of philosophical, political and psychoanalytical references, all, it goes without saying, “behind.”
(Stefano Cernuschi)

Book Works, London
160 p. • softcover • English
www.bookworks.org.uk

The Repetition Festival Show brings together, for the first time in Ireland, four of Clemens von Wedemeyer’s expanded film installations – Occupation, 2002, Otjesd, 2005, From the Opposite Side, 2007, and a selection of artworks from ‘The Fourth Wall’, including Against Death, 2009, in a single gallery room across an expanded period of time.

Clemens von Wedemeyer

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Michael Krebber, ed.

For all the fans, this is a must have. Michael Krebber found all Smith’s correspondence with Elisabeth Happe, who had invited him to take part in the side program of Art Cologne in 1977. Not easy task indeed. The reading of the reprinted documents and letters is somewhat hilarious, and you find yourself intensely sympathizing with the heroic hosts, for having to deal with the challenging organization of a surreal action that, retrospectively, seems was already running at full speed. And it is, yet another time, when unfolding the broadsheet poster.
(Stefano Cernuschi)

Welag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne
Broadsheet poster • English
www.buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de

In conclusion of their residency at Fondazione Morra Greco, on November 11th artists Gintaras Didziapetris and Renato Leotta presented the works they produced during their stay in Naples.
The installations presented in the exhibition curated by Francesca Boenzi are made up of varied elements, extrapolated from reality but reorganized on the basis of connections established on similarity, recurrence or on the assonance between forms and elements coming from different contexts.

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Larry Clark, Jonathan Velasquez, 2004.
Courtesy: the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London.

The first major retrospective in France dedicated to the work of photographer and cult director Larry Clark has managed to draw national attention — even international, one might say, since quite a few media outlets have talked about it even here in Italy — due to the protests by several Catholic associations that preceded its opening.

Mindful of what happened in Bordeaux, where in 2000, a child protection group brought charges over the “Présumés innocents” exhibition organized at CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporaine de Bordeaux — whose contents and references were accused of presenting pedophilia in a “favorable” light — leading to a drawn-out court case that lasted about ten years, the city has decided to make the retrospective off-limits to those under 18, the first time a French museum has ever taken such a measure. In the prevailing witch-hunt climate, even the publisher of the catalogue that was supposed to accompany the show has beaten a retreat.
Getting back to the exhibition, one can say it has been structured as a complete overview of Clark’s work and his 50-year career, all the way from Tulsa, to ghetto skateboarders in Los Angeles, through over 200 prints that show the artist’s epic obsession with teenagers, divided between sex, drugs, and “rock ‘n’ roll”. The usual stuff. The good news, though, is that visitors to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris will be able to enjoy the exhibition without the rowdiness or subtly perverse giggles of the umpteenth truckload of teenagers on educational trips, with their normal, healthy hormone surges.

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Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris
11 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris
www.mam.paris.fr

Often involving processes of accumulation, Tariq Alvi’s images and sculptural forms frequently deploy elaborate and meticulous elements of collage as they amass, map, manipulate, punctuate and re-direct issues of desire, economy and formalism. After the jump is a selection of images of “XX”, the first Los Angeles solo exhibition by the British artist.

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The third season of contemporary art at 6 Burlington Gardens examines how artists and designers use clothing as a mechanism to communicate and reveal elements of our identity.

The exhibition contains work by 30 emerging as well as established international contemporary practitioners including Marina Abramović, Acconci Studio, Azra Akšamija, Maja Bajevic, Handan Börüteçene, Hussein Chalayan, Alicia Framis, Meschac Gaba, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Andreas Gursky, Mella Jaarsma, Kimsooja, Claudia Losi, Susie MacMurray, Marcello Maloberti, La Maison Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Yoko Ono, Maria Papadimitriou, Grayson Perry, Dai Rees, Katerina šedá, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Helen Storey, Rosemarie Trockel, Sharif Waked, Gillian Wearing RA, Yohji Yamamoto and Andrea Zittel.

Marcello Maloberti, Marcello che arriva in treno, 2001. Courtesy: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan

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