Best of 2007 (artforum)

Mark Wallinger State Britain brilliantly exploited the fact that the galleries of Tate Britain are bisected by the legal boundary beyond which protesters are barred from approaching the British Houses of Parliament. Re-creating in painstaking facsimile a highly charged anti–Iraq War display, Wallinger’s project echoed its prototype’s challenge to Britain’s role in a murderous enterprise, but also went further, questioning the tenability of the publicness of public (that is, state-funded) institutions. In Zone, his contribution to Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, Wallinger again tellingly addressed the role of boundaries, this time in relation to notions of exclusion and identity. Here, by drawing an almost invisible yet tangible circle around the inner city of this staunchly conservative Catholic town, he invoked self-imposed borders. The residue of ghettos demarcated by the pale and the eruv lingers in terms used in everyday speech; today, as these complementary projects intimate, it threatens to go beyond language to once again take the form of action. “André Cadere: Peinture sans fin” (Painting Without End) (Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany) For years, artists I admire, like Gabriel Orozco and Saâdane Afif, have told me about the work of Cadere (1934–1978), and here I finally had the chance to see it. This retrospective made clear that the Romanian-born, Paris-based artist was a huge pain in the neck—he would insert his signature striped “barres de bois rond” (bars of round wood) into any show he felt could use them, often uninvited. But he was nonetheless a great practitioner of a colorful new form of “peinture sans fin,” which allowed for countless viewpoints and ways of exhibiting. Indeed, his Minimalist instruments of artistic intervention are the most delicate paintings I’ve seen this year. Two of them are exhibited together as Portrait of Gilbert & George, 1974. They’re pretty similar, but it’s their tiny differences that matter. Documenta 12 (Kassel) Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack’s Documenta was a triumph of curatorial tricksterism, a low-wattage but relentlessly engaged act of unbuilding the structure of the mega­exhibition. Via modes of archival archaism, the curators reconfigured a range of disparate practices in sometimes luminous installations. I still cannot get Kerry James Marshall’s Garden Party, 2003, a large painting installed in a small space in the Neue Galerie, out of my head. Its effect, when I chanced upon it, was reminiscent of the feeling of encountering Velásquez’s Las Meninas: It is as if when the visitor enters the room, all the figures in the painting turn in unison to greet him. That D12 was frustrating and enervating there is no doubt. That it was also provocative, rewarding, and important is becoming ever clearer in retrospect. Rudolf Stingel (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) This is what a survey should be: the opportunity to enter the artist’s practice on the artist’s own terms. That can be a tall order for many American institutions, which must struggle to renegotiate a space between the needs of art and what they perceive to be the needs of their publics. In this exhibition, organized by Francesco Bonami, those publics could have their way with the silver-foiled atrium and could experience to the highest degree how an artist can collaborate with an institution, thus participating in the construction of his own history. Décor: A Conquest by Marcel Broodthaers, 1975/2007 Seminal, groundbreaking, and important are words typically used to describe this two-room artwork by Belgian ex-poet Broodthaers, which was presented for the first time in New York this past summer at Michael Werner Gallery. Dust off the nineteenth-century cannons and stuffed python, unpack the twentieth-century pistols and patio furniture, and see what Mike Kelley was talking about in 1995, when he called Broodthaers’s approach “hokey and obvious,” yet admirable in its way of being so “sincere and insincere at the same time.” The work is like a movie set propped with ready-made stand-ins for Europe’s modern colonial history. Decades before “installation art” became a household term, Décor—an early, more playful instance of institutional critique—went quaintly and deviously to war. The uptown display coincided with a downtown screening, orga­nized by White Columns, of the artist’s strange short films at Anthology Film Archives.

Steve McQueen, Queen and Country (Central Library, Manchester, UK) Ninety-eight sheets of postage stamps, each bearing the image of a British soldier who died in Iraq, are arrayed on racks in an austere, coffinlike wooden display case. Because the photographs were donated by the families of the deceased, many are painfully intimate. These amateur domestic portraits are compressed into stamps—small slivers of public space—poignantly overlaid with the silhouette of the monarch in whose name they died. Installed in the Great Hall of the library, its rotunda encircled with glorious maxims about knowledge, Queen and Country stood as crushing proof of a nation’s inability to heed these exhortations to higher civic virtues.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, “Expodrome” (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris) A generation of artists who have long been concerned with questioning the status quo of exhibition making—and therefore largely steered clear of standard-fare solo or thematic shows—have now arrived at a point in their careers when they are being invited to present “comprehensive retrospectives” of their work in major art-world institutions. Gonzalez-Foerster wisely resisted lapsing into convention with her stunning journey through the unusual spaces of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in an exhibition that was organized by Angeline Scherf and included many collaboratively made works. With the sound of falling rain (Promenade, 2007), a topographic map representing various metropolises at night (Panorama, 2007), a son et lumière environment (Cosmodrome, 2001), and a retrospective of the artist’s films, the show immersed visitors in the quintessentially synesthetic experience of place that Gonzalez-Foerster specializes in.

Robert Rauschenberg, “Cardboards and Related Pieces” (Menil Collection, Houston) This wasn’t just one of the best shows I saw this year—it was one of the best shows I have ever seen. Exquisitely installed in the Menil Collection’s understated spaces, Rauschenberg’s reconfigured cartons were produced mostly in 1971 (the related “Venetians” and “Early Egyptians” series, also represented here, followed between 1972 and 1974). These deceptively “minor,” rarely seen works offered further evidence, if any was required, of Rauschenberg’s maverick imagination. Think of a point somewhere between the abrasive dynamics of Kurt Schwitters and the attitude of Cady Noland and you start to get close to these works’ alchemical magic.

Panama Pavilion (Venice Biennale) Richard Prince’s Nancy Spector–curated Guggenheim Museum retrospective was the undisputed center of gravity of the artist’s annus mirabilis, but as ever in the Princeian scheme of things, the museal main event was half the story. First, he raised the Body Shop on a freshly cleared upstate lot; then, with the help of a bodacious babe, he turned an art fair (Frieze) into an auto show. Let’s admit it, the runway debut of the artist’s customized handbags for Louis Vuitton seemed a dead-tired alternative—until the all-nurse lineup unmasked to reveal Naomi, Stephanie, et al., and the number one fan of the “Publicities” joined the “girls” onstage for the traditional couturier’s bow. My own nomination for the brightest star in a starry year? Prince’s self-commissioned tour de force for the 52nd Venice Biennale. Too bad they don’t give out Golden Lions for four-color posters.

“A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s” (Berkeley Art Museum, CA) As a friend of mine remarked upon seeing this show, a lot of Bruce Nauman’s early work is like some of the bad shit coming out of art schools nowadays. But when Nauman made it, it was so cool, so radical. The sculptures, films, videos, photos, and drawings the artist made in the 1960s effortlessly combine his personae as a nerdy art student in the studio (silly walk) and a techno geek (a hologram!) with his inner dork (counting stairs and playing with neon tubes) and, of course, the undeniable macho man (fishing!). The raw and almost organic mood of the show, organized by the Berkeley Art Museum’s Constance Lewallen, also felt right at home in architect Mario Ciampi’s 1970 concrete building, with its meandering ramps and staircases and floating balcony.

“Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32. Photographs by Richard Pare” (Museum of Modern Art, New York) Organized by Barry Bergdoll and Jean-Louis Cohen, Pare’s monumental photographic survey of vanguard architecture from postrevolutionary Russia had the power to make you nostalgic for something of which you had never been fully aware. Architects, from Erich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier to homegrown talents like Konstantin Melnikov and Grigory Simonov, aimed for a state-sponsored “reconstruction of daily life,” affecting everything from collective housing and power plants thrumming with “American tempo” to architecture parlante (“speaking architecture”), whose very form (e.g., schools laid out in a hammer-and-sickle form) contained the revolution. Brimming with utopian possibility, exuberant and eclectic in its volumes and massings, this architecture was the last bountiful harvest before the long Soviet winter set in and it fell victim to Stalinist orthodoxy and the exigencies of the Five-Year Plan.

Enrico David (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London) Reflecting on the tireless efforts by artists of late to merge art with the historical traditions of theater in all too often disharmonious and disingenuous combinations of Beckett, Brecht, and Cage, David’s recent exhibition, which was divided into three acts—“Corrupt and Crooked,” “Molten Brown Nylon,” and “Ultra Paste”—provided poetic justice. Motivated by a kind of unmediated pleasure principle, the artist transposed his obsession with treating “people as objects” and his abject perversions like “rubbing himself against the effigy of trustworthiness” into meticulously rendered illustrations, assemblages, and room-size installations. David explores a child’s (and his own) testing of reality through works like Sweet Seizure, 2002, “Shitty Tantrums,” 2006–2007, and Hop and Plop, 2007, all of which are rendered without big gestures and, thankfully, at a low volume. As the artist himself describes this soulful recollection of personal experience: “From the silent spectacle to its description, from the described scene to the moral interpretation of intentions and acts, from the interpreted act to the ‘anecdote.’”

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