March 2, 2009

BEST SHOW IN A PUBLIC SPACE
Second Place: “Mike Nelson: A Psychic Vacuum,” Organized by Creative Time. New York. Curators: Nato Thompson and Peter Eleey.
Mike Nelson transformed the interior of the long-unused Essex Street Market building on New York’s Lower East Side into a disquieting journey through a labyrinth of rooms, passageways and rooms-within-rooms, filling each haunting space with clever assemblages of salvage-yard materials that made the individual settings believable.
There were amazing interpretations of the building’s former life, such as a Chinese restaurant, a tattoo parlor and a fortune teller’s salon. Visitors became involved in a lengthy and unpredictable time-warped physical and psychological experience. Some of the disquieting architectural spaces underscored the social and commercial history of the neighborhood based on Nelson’s extensive research. Other rooms appeared to be metaphors for political and social issues that he believed were characteristic of the United States at a given moment.
First place: “Playing the Building: An Installation by David Byrne.” Organized by Creative Time, NY. Curator: Anne Pasternak
David Byrne came from the heights of his rock stardom to transform the Battery Maritime Building in lower Manhattan into a living sculpture in which time and space converged into waves of improvisational theater. Moving the avant-garde goal of erasing boundaries between artist and audience into the realm of public space, this multimedia artist molded his disciplines into a lyrical symphony of contrasts – inner and outer, light and shadow, sound and silence, archetype and human – as visitors played his synthesized piano. The intimate experience of touching the star’s keyboard electrified the building and propelled participants to center stage. Such an inventive marriage between the personal and the communal resurrected a forlorn relic of the city’s past into an authentic cauldron of change. A multilevel narrative transformed raw elements of sound, architecture, space and material into spirit. This alchemical rite served as a collective passage to an Obama-fueled super-reality in which past, present and future are to be experienced in a single quantum leap.

BEST ARCHITECTURE OR DESIGN SHOW
Second Place: “Design and the Elastic Mind.” Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Curator: Paola Antonelli.

Elasticity, the by-product of adaptability plus acceleration, is the ability to negotiate change and innovation without letting them interfere excessively with one’s own rhythms and goals. Designers with “elastic minds” have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease to the public as science and technology evolve. Several of these contributions—the Mosaic graphic user's interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. “Design and the Elastic Mind” highlighted objects, projects and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists and engineers from all over the world, ranging from nano-devices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices.
First Place: “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe.” Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in association with the Department of Special Collections at the Stanford University Libraries. Curators: K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller.
Appreciation for today’s technology and modular systems made this richly documented examination of Buckminster Fuller’s visionary mind all the more welcome. The presentation traced his innovative ideas; his years at Black Mountain College; his interactions with visual artists; his transdisciplinary theories; his blend of conceptual and practical, and his creation of systems that could be dynamic yet also redefine functionality. Above all, the exhibition demonstrated the Utopian side of creativity that has intrigued several generations.

BEST EXHIBITION OF DIGITAL MEDIA, VIDEO, or FILM
Second Place: “Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz.” Organized by P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center, Queens, NY. Curator: Klaus Biesenbach.
Featuring the newly restored version of this brilliantly designed 14-part film treatment of social corruption, the P.S. 1 exhibition brought Ranier Werner Fassbinder’s major epic to a new and wider audience. This was a curatorial presentation that offered visitors multiple methods to study Fassbinder’s artistic manipulation of conflicted psychologies. Each of the 14 episodes could be studied independently in individual projection areas, or the full sequence could be viewed on larger screens. Fassbinder’s visual design of content was highlighted by a wonderful range of film stills. The presentation also offered insightful documentation into his working methods by displaying the storyboards and other original planning notations.

First Place: “California Video.” Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles. Curator: Glenn Phillips.
Pre-eminent in the production of popular media and new communications technologies, California has nurtured generations of artists eager to push all the envelopes they can find, and the ever-evolving medium of video has permitted them rife and extravagant experimentation. Early on, the Long Beach Museum of Art began archiving the production of video art in California, but had to stop late in the 1990s. Happily, the J. Paul Getty Foundation took over maintenance and restoration of the collection and celebrated this adoption with the survey “California Video.” Deftly installed and documented, “California Video” drew equally upon the Long Beach cache and strategic loans, bringing single-channel tapes together with elaborate installations, bringing technological wizardry together with hilarious dumb shows, and bringing veterans of the video “movement” together with their successors.

BEST PERFORMANCE
Second Place: “Waiting For Godot in New Orleans”: A project by Paul Chan, co-produced by Creative Time and the Classical Theatre of Harlem with director Christopher McElroen. Curator: Nato Thompson.
Four free site-specific outdoor evening performances of Samuel Beckett's “Waiting for Godot,” a simple story, told in two acts, about two tramps waiting for someone named Godot, who never comes-- took place over two weekends in November 2007 in two New Orleans neighborhoods that were particularly hard hit by Hurricane Katrina. According to the artist, Paul Chan, “There is a terrible symmetry between the reality of New Orleans post-Katrina and the essence of this play, which expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait for help.”

First Place: “Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing).”
Presented by Performa O7 in cooperation with Haus der Kunst, Munich. Produced by Performa and presented at Deitch Studios, Long Island City. Curators: Stephanie Rosenthal and Andre Lepecki. Director: Andre Lepecki

Stephanie Rosenthal took a brave and brazen approach to Allan Kaprow when he was alive and, in 2004, got permission to organize a retrospective of his work at the Haus der Kunst in Munich that included the re-creation of his seminal work, “18 Happenings in 6 Parts,” that not only gave the English language a new noun, but also changed the course of art history of the second half of the 20th century. Andre Lepecki’s imaginative reconstruction of “18 Happenings” made it not only a vivid re-enactment of the past but also a vital and fresh work for the present.

BEST SHOW IN A COMMERCIAL GALLERY IN NEW YORK CITY
Second Place: “Jess : Paintings and Paste-Ups.” Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
If Frank O’Hara was a poet among painters in New York, Jess was a painter among poets in San Francisco. He was a collagist as well, and a writer and publisher, and a visionary as prodigious in his output as he was meticulous in its production. Blessed with one of the most transformative eyes and hands this side of Max Ernst, Jess could turn a children’s schoolbook into luscious paint, a rain of words into an optical hallucination, a pulp magazine into a glimpse of the apocalypse. Subject of a recent traveling retrospective, Jess’ art can never be exposed enough, and the small survey called “Paintings and Paste-Ups” mounted at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery returned this reclusive, eccentric master to the east coast for the first time since his death in 2004.

First Place: “Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns.” Tony Shafrazi Gallery. show conceived by Urs Fischer and Gavin Brown.
Boldly going where most gallerists fear to tread, Tony Shafrazi invited Urs Fischer and Gavin Brown to install a Rob Pruitt waterfall entitled Viagra Falls on his gallery’s staircase as the come-on for “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” Conceived by Fischer and Brown, this sprawling group exhibition collaged a wide-ranging assortment of 25 modern and contemporary artworks, orchestrating an updated, layered salon style in which an original masterwork often hung atop a contemporary reproduction—Francis Bacon over Kenny Scharf, Lawrence Wiener over Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Picabia over Donald Baechler. Intellectually provocative and visual delightful, “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” was an effective coup de theatre that offered both a concise essay on stylistic innovation and an intimate glimpse to the creative dissonance of the artistic mind at work.

BEST SHOW IN A COMMERCIAL GALLERY NATIONALLY
Second Place: “Jay Defeo: Applaud the Black Fact.” Nielsen Gallery, Boston.
This focused exhibition presented a selection of photography, collages, drawings and paintings spanning the years 1951 to 1989, the decades before and after the Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo completed her monumental painting, “The Rose” (1958-65). A selection of drawings, paintings, photographs and photo collages that ranged from organic abstractions of the sublime to still lifes explored the universes outside and within the artist. The evolution of DeFeo’s expansive and unique iconography based on prosaic objects that were transformed in her work to mysterious and evocative images was here illuminated.
First Place: James Welling. Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
In his recent photograms, “Flowers,” “Holly,” “Torsos” and “Authors,” James Welling continues to investigate the tension between representation and abstracted visual experience. He shows how light and color articulate form and how the framing of an image defines composition. Welling engages the materials, production and history of the medium of photography, and collapses them into works of art that remain quintessentially photographic while questioning the very nature of photography itself. Welling has always mined the space between photography and conceptual art – creating photographs that are as much about vision, light, negative and solid as they are about image and content.

BEST SHOW BY A NON-PROFIT GALLERY OR SPACE
Second Place: “Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City.” New York Public Library, Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Curator: Stephen Pinson.
The phrase in the exhibition’s title “Eminent Domain” traditionally means “the taking of private property for public use.” but today it is commonly contended that the reverse is frequently the case. This exhibition riffed on this hot-button issue and its parallels in photography with selections from five projects by five New-York City photographers, Thomas Holton, Bettina Johae, Reiner Leist, Zoe Leonard and Ethan Levitas, with an autobiographical text by Glenn Ligon. Each artist meditated on the ways in which the city’s residents use their public-private domain.

First Place: “Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities.” Organized by the Drawing Center, NY, and the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Foundation, Vienna. Curators: Dieter Bogner and Joao Ribas.
This insightful exhibition explored the role drawing played in the interdisciplinary work of Frederick Kiesler, who seems to have recognized the way perception flows long before the era of cyberspace technology. The curator’s selections clearly presented Kiesler’s visions for redefining space in a way that emphasized the organic and the blending of the real and the conceptual. The show offered an opportunity to better understand his projects -- those that were unrealized and those that were carried out, like his pioneering designs for Peggy Guggeheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. Designed by an architectural team well versed in Kiesler’s theories, the exhibition’s curvilinear vitrines formed an endless band through space and effectively reminded viewers of Keisler’s design for his now legendary Endless House.

BEST SHOW IN A UNIVERSITY GALLERY
Second Place: “New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection. Organized by the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. Curator: Pepe Karmel.
This exhibition re-examined that eclectic period marked by the descent of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Pop and Minimal art. As Karen Rosenberg noted in The New York Times, “‘New York Cool’ reminds us that the art world of the late 50s and early 60s was a multifarious scene shaped by more than a handful of artists.” Organized in thematic groupings, the show featured key works by artists like Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson and Robert Rauschenberg. Presenting this period of artistic activity as diverse and complex, “New York Cool” skilfully countered reductive notions that, traditionally, had viewed this moment solely in terms of the art that it preceded and anticipated. Allusive instead of expressive, understated rather than declarative, this work demonstrated what the art critic and former NYU professor Irving Sandler would later call the “Cool Art” of the 1960s.
First Place: “Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy.” Organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA. Curator: Deborah Rothschild.

Sarah and Gerald Murphy, the dashing Roaring 20s couple who befriended
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky, among others, were brought vividly to life in the captivating exhibition “Making It New.” Curator Deborah Rothschild deftly blended Modernist masterpieces by the likes of Picasso, Fernand Leger, and Natalia Goncharova, not to mention seven canvases by Gerald Murphy, with family films and photographs and a video of the Swedish Ballet’s production of “Within the Quota,” featuring costumes and a backdrop designed by Mr. Murphy. The period flavor of other documents, as well as Sarah Murphy’s wedding dress, contributed to the You Are There nature of this riveting survey show.

BEST HISTORICAL SHOW
Second Place: “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions.” Organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the Museo de Belles Artes, Bilboa, Spain. Curators: Keith Christiansen (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Pierre Rosenberg (Musee du Louvre).

This landmark exhibition introduced Nicholas Poussin as an artist deeply committed to exploring nature and landscape—rather than just depicting ancient history, mythology and the Bible, for which he is mostly known and celebrated. Poussin drew from nature and painted imaginary landscapes throughout his career, beginning with his earliest years in Rome. About 40 paintings and 40 drawings created en plein air on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrated mastery with which the French artist reconfigured and structured nature to ennoble it and capture its pastoral beauty.

First Place: “Gustave Courbet.” Organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Reunion de Musees Natiuonal and the Musee D’Orsay, Paris and the Communaute d’agglomeration de Montpellier/Musee Fabre, Montpelier. Curators: Gary Tinterow and Kathryn Calley Galitz (Metropolitan), Laurence des Cars and Dominique de Font-Reaulx (Musee D’Orsay), Sylvain Amic and Michel Hilaire (Montpellier)
The great contribution of the pioneer of modernism, Gustav Courbet (1819-1877), was to elevate scenes of modern life to the scale and status hitherto reserved for history painting. The famed Ornans paintings, together with portraits, nudes, landscapes, hunting subjects and the small “captivity” paintings he executed while a political prisoner made up this masterful and comprehensive exhibition of 130 of his works drawn from private and public collections in Europe and the United States.

BEST MONOGRAPHIC MUSEUM SHOW NATIONALLY
Second place: Dali?: Painting & Film. Organized by the Tate Modern, London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in collaboration with the Fudacio Gala-Salvador Dali. Curators: Mathew Gale and Helen Sainsbury (Tate Modern) and Ilene Fort and Sara Cochran (LACMA)

Just when you thought there was nothing more to be said about Salvador Dali, three institutions collaborated to focus attention on a fascinating and enduring facet of the Surrealist’s long career: his collaborative work for the Silver Screen. Alongside a selection of remarkable paintings and drawings, gallerygoers could watch Dali and Luis Bunuel’s 1929 masterpiece, “Un Chien Andalou,” in its entirety—it’s mostly known from one short sequence—as well as a range of other film excerpts, including a dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” of 1944; Walt Disney’s “Destino,” finally animated in 2003; and an Andy Warhol “Screen Test” of 1966. Dali’s genius was confirmed yet again.

First Place: “Jasper Johns: Gray.” Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in cooperation with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Curators: James Rondeau and Douglas Druick (Chicago, Nan Rosenthal (Metropolitan)
Two paintings installed at the beginning of “Jasper Johns: Gray” forcefully conveyed the show’s premise. Juxtaposed were the colorful “False Start” and its somber twin, “Jubilee,” both from 1959. The pair prepared viewers for an astounding journey through the artist’s careerlong affair with the color gray. This stunning exhibition included paintings, drawings, works on paper and sculptures that all employed gray—in all its shades and moods. The elegant installation succeeded in reframing our perceptions of familiar works and presented gray not as a way station between black and white, but rather as an ever-expanding zone of originality and productivity to which this renowned artist has returned time and time again.

BEST THEMATIC MUSEUM SHOW NATIONALLY
Second Place: “Declaring Space: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein.” Organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Curator: Michael Auping.
“ Declaring Space” focused on the work of four artists whose works had a dramatic impact on the complex development of abstract space and color in the years following World War II: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein. According to the curator, Michael Auping, “The work of each of these artists represents a different stage in the expansion of the grand space abstract painters were imagining in the 1950s and 1960s.” Creating complex and dramatic philosophical and visual metaphors, these highly influential artists crossed the boundary of pictorial space, entering a new realm of abstract theater. This exhibition reframed abstract expressionism as a total-body experience, as tactile and active.

First Place: “The Old, Weird America.” Organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Curator: Toby Kamps.
Toby Kamps, senior curator for Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, found in the music writer Greil Marcus’s phrase the perfect point of departure for a survey of contemporary artists venturing off the aesthetic reservation in search of originality. Marcus used “Old Weird America” to sum up the mixture of country, blues and folk that Bob Dylan and the Band achieved in The Basement Tapes. The spirit of the show was as much punk as Dylan, but the 18 artists in this exhibition covered all aspects of American history. From Sam Durant’s revisionist diorama of Pilgrim-Indian interaction, to Kara Walker’s animations of slave-master scenarios, to Dario Robleto’s fabricated album covers for musicals like “Godspell,” the artists of “Old Weird America” found ways to combine myth and fact to structure compelling alternatives to our nation’s history.

BEST MONOGRAPHIC MUSEUM SHOW IN NEW YORK CITY
Second Place - Martin Puryear. Organized by Museum of Modern Art, NY. Curator: John Elderfield.
In an age of computer-based images, hands-off production, and the use of high tech materials, Martin Puryear strikes a special chord: Using wood from different species of trees, he artfully tortures, twists and polishes his organic materials, to create large, airy sculptures that taunt viewers with familiar forms yet escape recognition, function and naming. Unforgettable is his three-story-high “ladder” that dangles free at an angle as if meant to transport us in spirit from this world to the next. Also memorable is a piece that conjures up a cart weighted down by a white hexagonal shape driven by a pair of oversize thinly-spoked wagon wheels that suggest -- if not a transcendental destination, something of Giacometti’s existentialist destiny. Some of the artist’s anthropomorphic heads, made from latticed slats, cling to the floor, while other pieces, assembled from a sequence of disconnected shapes, effortlessly rise up as if defying gravity. Puryear’s work testifies to the nostalgic charm of art based on pre-industrial traditions and simple tools, while his technical know-how has opened it beyond the singularity of wood as raw material.

First Place - Louise Bourgeois. Organized by the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Curators: Frances Morris (Tate Modern), Marie-Laure Bernadac and Jonas Storsve (Pompidou Center) and Nancy Spector (Guggenheim).
The range and amplitude of Louise Bourgeois’s more than seven decades of extraordinary art-making is so innovative, influential and vast that the catalog for the "Louise Bourgeois" retrospective, which made its first U.S. stop at the Guggenheim Museum, is a glossary. She has condensed her intensity into the primal lines of the 1947 drawing "Femme Maison"; unleashed it in the ferocity of the 1977 "Destruction of the Father" installation of cast animal parts; rendered it elegantly elegiac in sculptures of real clothes that appropriate bones as hangars. The curator Nancy Spector adjusted the exhibition organized by the Tate and the Pompidou Center to the Guggenheim’s architecture. She emphasized Bourgeois’s ubiquitous spiral and revealed the classical modernist beauty of the early work in a manner that has not occurred before while also paying homage to the explosion of contemporary creativity that has followed Bourgeois’s last American retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art 26 years ago. At 97, Bourgeois continues working.

BEST THEMATIC MUSEUM SHOW IN NEW YORK CITY
Second Place: “Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today.” Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Curator: Ann Temkin
On a film screen mounted high, a young man painted a small room floor-to-ceiling red, exited and then returned to repaint the whole thing orange, followed by yellow, green, blue and violet in John Baldessari’s "Six Colorful Inside Jobs." Byron Kim’s grided "Synecdoche" defined 400 variations of what used to be known as "flesh tones" in 400 panels that owned the wall. James Lambie surrounded Rodin’s "Balzac" with an eye-popping floor design through multicolored strips of store-bought vinyl tape. The museum guards wore Daniel Buren’s colorful striped vests. "Color Chart" was one of those rare, transformative exhibitions that brilliantly rethink a subject, with verve and drama. Ann Tempkin’s premise that many artists have been experimenting with color as a found object, ready-made by paint manufacturers, has repositioned debates about color and redefined ideas about art.

First Place: “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976.” Organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in collaboration with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Curator: Norman L. Kleeblatt. Consulting Curators: Maurice Berger, Douglas Dreishpoon and Charlotte Eyerman.
This thought-provoking show framed nearly three decades of American art through the polarizing polemics of the era’s most ardent and eloquent champions—Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Assembling paintings and sculptures by artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and many others, the show presented modernist criticism in a new light. To better understand the historical and cultural background of this transformative period, viewers were invited to peruse illuminating and informative context rooms, which helped delineate a more nuanced understanding of these critics’ approaches and influences.