Everyone knows about the meat dress that Lady Gaga donned for the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, but not many will remember that Linder wore one for her punk concert with Ludus way back in 1981 at the Hacienda in Manchester. Different eras, different forms of rebellion (according to the artists involved), but the alienation that women face remains the same.

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Some exhibitions can be groundbreaking, capturing the spirit of their times to such a degree that they become a milestone whose impact lingers on even decades later.

In 1977 Douglas Crimp organized a show at Artists Space, which was run at the time by Helene Winer before she opened Metro Pictures. This show, called “Pictures”, in many ways determined the future development of a generation of artists that radically influenced the art scene in New York and around the world, and what was then described as the postmodern relationship to pictures. They were playing with the idea of aesthetic and non-aesthetic, balanced between the role of the artist and the popular-image maker.

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An interview with Jill Magid by Magnolia de la Garza.

You just opened a show at Labor in Mexico City.

Yes, it’s called Faust 24 and mainly consists of a piece called Tooley, A Tragedy, a five-channel video and sound installation and two books. The story of the piece began in 2010 with a suicide at the University of Austin, Texas, where I was researching at the time. A student put on a ski mask and took an AK-47 and went through campus shooting up into the air and into the ground, basically performing the role of the “school shooter” as we have come to know “him”. But avoiding shooting at anyone. He then went to the top floor of the library, to the section for comparative literature and poetry, and killed himself.

I had been working a different body of work about another very public shooting in Austin at the state capitol, in which I compared the shooter, whose name happened to be Fausto, to Goethe’s Faust. Then I heard about this other shooting. So I made an open-records request to the Austin police department, and they sent me five DVDs of video evidence, and from that material I built the piece Tooley, A Tragedy.

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Those who may think of African art as displays of naïf canvases or dark, intimidating masks by unknown craftsmen may be disappointed this time.
The idea of Africa itself has shifted and widened into a multifaceted realm that spans a wide range of disciplines, a psychic and physical space within the contemporary world. The main aim of this show, co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, MAD’s Charles Bronfman International Curator, and Leslie King-Hammond, Founding Director of the Center for Race and Culture at MICA, is to present a broad spectrum of African art, design, fashion, crafts and architecture, and challenge the conventional notions of a singular African aesthetic or identity. Featuring the works of over 100 artists who live and work in Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States and the Caribbean, it reveals unexpected standpoints, ranging from the fascination of Japanese youth for Black culture in the 1990s, to the most recent developments in African-American architecture and design, with an eye on the hair wars, cross-pollination in the fashion world between Missoni and the African continent, the quilters’ collective, Afrikea, and the artworks of Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare and Romuald Hazoumé, among many others.
When you come out of the museum and start going around Columbus Circle, the idea that Africa is not just a continent or a defined and univocal entity, but a Global Project, may be spinning in your mind.

(Elena Tavecchia)

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Installation view, The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow, 2011

The Modern Institute is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Dirk Bell. This exhibition relates directly to Bell’s recent project Made in Germany, which was presented at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Sadie Coles HQ, London and also at The Modern Institute in the Winter of 2010.

Working with technology and the iconography and materials of contemporary life, Bell’s work is also infused with myth, symbolism and emotion; and laced with references and associations that question society’s various attempts to make sense of the belief systems and the structures that control the world. The new works reflect the relationship between society and human nature, and question the presence and absence of freedom and love in today’s world.

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VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Enrico David.

Anthropologists relate smiling to the baring of teeth. So in Enrico David’s work, there is an inextricable bond between hysteria and the terror of human existence. For his exhibition at VW, Enrico David has created a harrowing body of work that confronts physical decay, vulnerability, voyeurism, and shame. The artist’s latest paintings, drawings and sculptures are enigmatic representations of the human body, often distorted or fragmented to humorous and horrifying effect. The works draw on personal memories and private experiences informed by historical references from Art Deco and Wiener Werkstätte to Joseph Beuys. There is an element of theatricality to the exhibition, in which works are deliberately staged in dialogue with one another.

“On the brink of not being ready to be born,” is how Enrico David has described the condition of his works. They evoke a disquieting state of evolution and entropy, devoid of choice – an inherent awkwardness.

Since spring 2010 Enrico David has been artist in residence at Stiftung Laurenz Haus, Basel, where this new body of work was created. This is his first solo exhibition since the highly acclaimed “How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy?”, presented at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, in 2009. Recent major solo exhibitions include “Bulbous Marauder”, Seattle Art Museum; “Ultra Paste”, ICA London and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; and “Chicken Man Gong” at Tate Britain, London, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Enrico David was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 2009. In June 2011 Enrico David will present new works in a solo exhibition at Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice.

The exhibition opened January 15 with a reception for the artist and continues through March 4.

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Just a stone’s throw from the new Whitechapel Gallery — even less, if you take the Central, Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith & City line to the Liverpool Street stop — Raven Row is a non-profit space that opened its doors in 2009, sparing no expenses. Not that there was a need to. Director Alex Sainsbury is, after all, the son of Sir Tim Sainsbury, i.e., head of the second richest family in Britain. In a building that was constructed by the silk mercers who set up shop in the area around 1750, seriously damaged by fires between 1950 and 1970, and then abandoned for a decade, the renovation by 6a Architects studio has left the traces of its history still visible—accentuated them, actually. The gallery’s programming is designed to be as appealingly scrupulous and selective for specialists as it is tantalizing for the art-curious public, with a particular focus on established international artists who somehow have not become well-known or received proper attention in England.
After Ray Johnson, Harun Farocki and Eduardo Paolozzi — just to cite the first names that come to mind — the spaces of Raven Row will be turned over to filmmaker and photographer Hilary Lloyd, who has developed the exhibition project by following the evolution of the space over the last three years. (Antonio Scoccimarro)

56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS
www.ravenrow.org

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

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