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Preview summer 2002

ArtForum, May, 2002

Three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews forty shows opening around the world between May 1 and August 31.

Matthew Barney: The CREMASTER Cycle

MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE

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Originally slated to open this spring at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, "Matthew Barney: The CREMASTER Cycle" will begin its run at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne--not quite shabby seconds but a bit of a downer for those in the States looking forward to considering the five-film epic as a whole. After numerous postponements, the outright cancellation of the show, a victim of the Guggenheim's present financial straits, was widely bruited in art circles and even in the New York Times. Instead, the three-venue tour will "climax" in New York--fittingly, as the final sequences of CREMASTER 3, the longest, last, and arguably most ambitious film in the cycle, was shot in the Guggenheim rotunda, and many of the objects on view in the show are specific to the museum. For now, New Yorkers can console themselves with the fact that CREMASTER 3 premieres in Manhattan May 1, ahead of the Cologne opening, on the Ziegfeld Theater's gargantuan seventy-foot screen. (It will subsequently be shown at Film Forum, fro m May 15 to 28.)

CREMASTER 3 displays Barney's often obscure but compelling vision to great advantage. Clocking some three hours of screen time, it is filled with the sort of ralenti-obsessional passages typical of his cinematic work, but there are also explosions of breathless action--e.g., the artist's scaling all five tiers of the Guggenheim rotunda, each stratum corresponding to one of the cycle's films. One level boasts a mosh pit for a crowd of hardcore rowdies; another, a row of Busby Berkeley-ish bathing beauties. Ever the perfectionist, the artist built a replica of the Chrysler Building lobby as a principal set, only to destroy it in one of the final "action-adventure" sequences. Perhaps CREMASTER 3's most successful coup de theatre, though, is the casting of Richard Serra as a sadistic dentist/Fountainhead-type megalomaniac architect/(Serra-esque?) sculptor.

The Ludwig show will include all five CREMASTER productions as well as an ample selection of related sculptures, photographs, and drawings. But a number of significant works, those relating to the Guggenheim itself, will be shown at the New York venue only. The films will inevitably enjoy center stage, but according to Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, who spent some six years planning the show, the exhibition makes a strong case for Barney as a sculptor. Often the sculptural and other "subsidiary" works have been regarded as merely vendible wares whose purpose is to finance further cinematic experiments. "There are so many ways into the cycle, and the films are only the most well known," Spector comments. "The exhibition will show how narratives can be constructed through other objects as well. Matthew thinks of his work overall, including the films, as a sculptural practice."

David Rimanelli

Joan Mitchell

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

"Why have there been no great women artists?" Linda Nochlin asked famously--and a bit rhetorically--three decades ago. The standard reply usually involves male oppression and old-boy institutional bias. Add to that those relatively benign accidents of fate--if you're Joan Mitchell, being in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g., France during the heyday of American abstraction), not to mention being an ornery person--and the deck is decidedly stacked. With a sixty-picture retrospective and a full-scale catalogue, the Whitney and freelance curator Jane Livingston aim to make the case for Mitchell. Headlining: a "compositionally daring" diptych as yet unseen outside the artist's studio. June 20-Sept. 29.

Peter Plagens

Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Museums and private collectors in New York are temporarily shedding their Gauguins--an exceptionally rich hoard--to supplement the Metropolitan Museum of Art's own holdings in a nearly 120-piece survey of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and works on paper. Organized by Met curators Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, the show is just the latest of several recent manifestations of Gauguin's perennial fascination. While the artist today may not have the creative grip still exerted by contemporaries such as Seurat and Cezanne, the unfolding twenty-year trajectory of his work--from imitative Sunday impressionist to exotic liberator--continues to enthrall. June 18-Oct. 20.

Richard Shone

Museum Ludwig, Cologne, June 5-Sept. 1; Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Oct. 10, 2002-Jan. 5, 2003; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Feb. 13, 2003-June 11, 2003.

Out of Site

NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Architecture: art. Art [architecture]. Architecture = Art? Where one fief ends and the other begins--and all the encroachment along the frontier--is becoming a fallback fascination in both weary camps. Into the fray comes "Out of Site." Organized by the New Museum's Anne Ellegood, the show focuses on "fictional architectural spaces and topographies" as elaborated by fifteen young artists--among them the brilliant Haluk Akakce. There will be imaginary lands, futuristic cityscapes (some critical, some just plain fun), and--what else?--the obligatory site-specific demonstrations of disciplinary irrelevance. June 28-Oct. 13.

Preview summer 2002

ArtForum, May, 2002

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