WEST VANCOUVER, CANADA West Vancouver Museum Sonny Assu, an Aboriginal artist from Vancouver, is gaining attention for his reversal of early 20th-century art history. More than 100 years after Western artists “advanced” art by looking “back” at Aboriginal culture, Assu is turning to Western art to modernize Aboriginal traditions of the Northwest Coast.
Éamonn O’Doherty
DUBLIN Kevin Kavanagh Gallery About two weeks before this exhibition opened, I was sitting at the bedside of Éamonn O’Doherty in a Dublin cancer hospital. He had been given two months to live (though, in the end, he only got three weeks), but he faced dying in the same manner that he broached his sculpture: with impish and iconoclastic good humor, a lunchtime bottle of red wine, and a request that I do a “proper” interview with him, “proper” meaning a no-holds-barred, utterly indiscreet assassination of all those he considered morally contemptible in the world of art.
2011 Asian Art Biennial “Mediation/Meditation”
TAICHUNG, TAIWAN National Museum of Fine Arts “Mediation/Meditation,” the third edition of the Asian Art Biennial, was curated by Iris Shu-ping Huang of the National Museum. The dual theme made an additional allusion to Japanese economist Kenichi Ohmae’s theory of the M-shaped society, which describes the global decline of the middle class and its replacement with equal peaks of rich and poor.
Rima Schulkind
WASHINGTON, DC Touchstone Gallery This exhibition of eight complicated assemblages made from a variety of recycled objects marked a departure from Rima Schulkind’s earlier work. Collectively addressing the fertility of human invention and the wastefulness produced by obsolete technology, each “totem” displays a particular category of technological devices, including those used to manipulate numbers, reproduce images, communicate sound, write words, measure time, and record history.
Vanessa German
NEW YORK Pavel Zoubok Gallery Vanessa German paints over old, white-skinned dolls with black pigment and tar, delving into identity, race, and racism (as in the use of the term “tar baby” to refer to someone who is very dark skinned).
Maurizio Cattelan
NEW YORK Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Some years ago, I argued in favor of making a critical distinction between works of art that are significant and those that are merely symptomatic of the times.
Do Ho Suh
NEW YORK Lehmann Maupin Do Ho Suh, easily one of the most interesting sculptors working in America today, presented a lot of things in this show—models of homes (one like a dollhouse and the other done in a pale-green resin), as well as such mundane objects as a sink, a circuit-breaker, and a doorknob (the last three made of translucent cloth).
Jonathan Prince
NEW YORK The Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue Felicitously staged among stately bamboo in the soaring atrium of New York City’s IBM building, Jonathan Prince’s four monumental steel sculptures brought to mind one of Plato’s favorite sayings: God is always doing geometry. Classic forms bearing historical and symbolic associations, Prince’s obelisk, flattened sphere, cube, and torus all display rich sienna patinas that accentuate their contours.
Michael Arata
LOS ANGELES Beacon Arts Building To say that Michael Arata is prolific is almost laughable. “Arataland!,” a retrospective of this Los Angeles-based artist, recently filled more than 20 rooms in the three-story Beacon Arts Building.
“Boundaries Obscured”
NEW YORK Haunch of Venison These days, the synergy between art and life occurs so quickly that it is hard for artists to keep up. Opening a few months after the Arab Spring and only a week after Occupy Wall Street decamped from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, “Boundaries Obscured” took on the hot topics of globalization, technology, and the blurred geographic boundaries responsible for outsourcing, Facebook revolutions, and collaborative protests over economic inequality.
