Tops & Flops 2017

 Marsden Hartley Mt. Katahdin (Maine), Autumn #2  (1939–40) Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 102.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, Bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal
 Xavier Veilhan im französischen Pavillon der Venedig Biennale 2017
 Ragen Moss organized by Lucas Blalock, exhibition view
 Sandra Eleta (Panamanian, b. 1942) Edita (la del plumero), Panamá (Edita [the one with the feather duster], Panama) (1977) from the series La servidumbre (Servitude) (1978-79), Black-and-white photograph, 48.3 × 48.3 cm Courtesy of Galería Arteconsult S.A., Panama. © the artist.
 Nilima Sheikh Works from the series "Each Night put Kashmir in your dreams," (2013-14), installation view at Benaki Museum–Pireos Street Annexe, Athens, documenta 14 Photo: Stathis Mamalakis
 Political School in Kumrovec
 Frieze London 2017 Opening Night Party at The Groucho Club
 Oscar Tuazon Firebuilding (Burn the Framework)
 Call Me By Your Name
 Nuray Demir Hamamness
 Ai Weiwei "Law of the Journey" (2017), exhibition view
 Dana Schutz Open Casket  (2016) Oil on canvas, 99 x 135 cm; Collection of the artist; Courtesy Petzel, New York

This art year had so much to offer that losing orientation wasn't very difficult. So why not, we thought, organize it into what was best, and what was worst. 

Das Kunstjahr 2017 hatte so viel zu bieten, dass man leicht die Orientierung verlieren konnte. Hier die Tops und Flops einiger unserer Autoren.

 

Daniel Baumann, Direktor der Kunsthalle Zürich

 

Marsden Hartley's Maine
The Met Breuer, New York, 15.3.–18.6.2017

_______INSERT_______

Die Ausstellung zeigte, wie sich ein Werk – nicht ohne Widersprüche – zwischen (internationalem) Modernismus und (amerikanischem) Regionalismus entwickelt und dadurch einen ganz eigenen Charakter erhält, für den Kunstgeschichte und Institution noch immer nicht genügend diskursive Werkzeuge bereitstellen. Der amerikanische Maler Josh Smith scheint einer der würdigen Nachfolger von Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) zu sein. 

smiley TOP 

 

Wang Bing, Mrs. Fang, Dokumentarfilm (2017)

_______INSERT_______

Der Film hatte an der Documenta 14 Premiere und holte am Filmfestival in Locarno den Goldenen Leoparden. Ohne jegliche Aufgeregtheit, jedoch mit einer aufwühlenden und zeitweise grenzwertigen Aufmerksamkeit verfolgt der chinesische Filmmacher Wang Bing die an Alzheimer erkrankte Bäuerin Fang Xiuying. In diesem Film offenbart sich, was den meisten (Groß-)Ausstellungen heute fehlt: Konzentration als Form von Großzügigkeit.

smiley TOP 

 

Venedig Biennale / Die Pavillons

_______INSERT_______

Die Pavillons von Phyllida Barlow, Mark Bradford, Geoffrey Farmer, Anne Imhof und Xavier Veilhan und wie dort (nationale) Architektur zum Hintergrund und in die Knie gezwungen wurde. 

smiley TOP 

 

sad FLOP:

- Die Männer und ihr Hunger nach Machtmissbrauch
- Social Media
- Das Format "Großausstellung"

 

 

 

Joanna Fiduccia, Art Historian

 

Ragen Moss
Ramiken Crucible, New York, 26.2.–26.3.2017

_______INSERT_______

Ragen Moss's transparent polyethelyne encasements in the form of torsos and overstretched sweaters, partly painted with plaids and patterns, were the most original works I saw this year. Organized by the tremendous photographer and human Lucas Blalock, the works were suspended from metal rods in Ramiken's secondary basement space, the boiler room of an old office building. But the mood was less abattoir than psychic boutique for witty and uncanny statements of how bodies contain and disclose form. Moss's works offer at once a centuries-overdue reinvigoration of polychrome sculpture and the charge of something that awaits an entirely new language. 

smiley TOP 

 

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 15.9.–31.12.2017

 

_______INSERT_______

This exhibition was the fruit of an extraordinary amount of research that turned up an equally extraordinary bevy of thrilling, gorgeous, affecting, funny, forceful art. It knocked me off my feet. 

smiley TOP 

 

Memphis Greenspace, Inc., and other depositions of Confederate Monuments

_______INSERT_______

Three cheers for the deposition of monuments to white supremacy across the U.S.: for civilians who dragged them off their pedestals under cover of night, for civil servants who organized their efficient removal, and for solutions like Memphis Greenspace, Inc., a non-profit started late this fall and helmed by the attorney Van D. Turner, Jr., which recently purchased a park from the city of Memphis – a sale authorized by the city council and executed by Mayor Jim Strickland – and then summarily removed its statues of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Greenspace will hold a townhall to decide how to use the newly liberated park space, and intends to repeat the move in other parks in the future. As the art historian Dell Upton has argued, "This is not ultimately a conflict over monuments. It is a conflict over the values that we wish to endorse in the contemporary public realm." 

smiley TOP 

 

The sale of "Leonardo da Vinci's" Salvatore Mundi at Christie's

_______INSERT_______

Because "flop" is far too anodyne a word for the cataclysmic spectacle of Trump, the unrelenting destruction of black lives, and various other sorrows and afflictions of 2017, I'll limit myself to decrying the sale of this work for the mind-splitting, soul-sickening figure of $450 million. No matter that the assessment of art historians — scholars who have spent their entire adult lives studying this period — was that the work is very likely, and at best, a mediocre workshop product. 

sad FLOP

 

 

 

Dean Kissick, Writer

 

Documenta 14, Athens/Kassel

_______INSERT_______

A single picture hangs on my bedroom wall: a photograph, taken from the street, of Vivian Suter’s paintings hanging in one of the Glass Pavilions on Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse, which I found in a magazine. Adam Szymczyk’s Documenta was, I think, the work of a mad genius, and the most ambitious exhibition I’ve ever visited. It was overwhelming, sprawling and wildly over budget; the work was complicated, incredibly, provocatively obscure and seemed to touch on every subject under the sun. Going to Athens and Kassel was like having a very strange recurring dream.
I often find that, after many hours of looking at too many artworks, and drinking too many coffees, one reaches a point of exhaustion that can quickly tip over into euphoria: on the first day, around 10:30pm, looking at Nilima Sheikh’s paintings of Kashmir hanging in the Benaki Museum on Pireos Street, I felt what I can only describe as unclouded joy, and that was the moment when I really gave myself over to Documenta and all its weird leaps and bounds.

smiley TOP 

 

Pavilion of Shamans, Viva Arte Viva
57th Venice Biennale

_______INSERT_______

Christine Macel’s Pavilion of Shamans revolved around Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar (A Sacred Place): a large, knitted chrysalis descending from the ceiling to the gallery floor, which was covered in bark. Inside, visitors meditated or checked their phones. Outside, indigenous Huni Kuin Indians led conga lines around the Arsenale. Although Um Sagrado Lugar was inspired by traditional spaces used for ayahuasca ceremonies, its appropriation of shamanism was disappointingly tame and without any psychedelic epiphanies, visionary self-harming, or chanting-induced otherworldly trance states (even in the sanitary ayahuasca ceremonies of Beverly Hills, one would expect to see some projectile vomiting). Nor was any sort of transcendental artistic experience offered in its place.
While rather beautiful, the Pavilion of Shamans exemplified a frustrating social trend of denying the fact that Western democracy is in crisis, that capitalism is in crisis, that technology is transforming our idea of what it is to be human and that the conditions of reality are falling apart, and retreating instead into magical thinking, self-care and a woolly, exoticised spirituality emptied of all meaning.

sad FLOP

 

 

Ella Plevin, Writer and Stylist

 

A trunk full of slime eels exploding on an Oregon highway

_______INSERT_______

You know what I didn’t care much for in 2017? Art. Yes this was a lustrous vision of death in all it’s cruelty but my god, it was so much more than anything I saw in any gallery. Was it also a portent for things to come? #metoo

smiley TOP 

 

Jenna Sutela, gutbrain queen

_______INSERT_______

That being said, Jenna’s work is endlessly fascinating. She is like a small Finnish god mapping out her boundless span, from the microflora in our gut to imagined cosmic janitors. Specifically; the video and performance she made out of a visit to the European Space Agency, which she presented during October’s Serpentine marathon.

smiley TOP 

 

Shooting Metahaven's Possessed

_______INSERT_______

In March I flew to Croatia with Metahaven and a small film crew to shoot some scenes for their next movie, Possessed. One of the locations was an abandoned political school in Kumrovec, birthplace of Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito. There was a palpable ache on one floor of the building which was briefly used as a refugee holding centre after the war. I miss the Croatian crew who told me stories and kept refilling my glass. 

smiley TOP 

 

Bitcoin Bros

_______INSERT_______

Yes, well done, you’re way clever and a total oracle. No, I didn’t buy any before it got hot. And no, I’m not saying blockchain isn’t *fascinating* but Jesus Christ shut up about it already Nathedual. Go put on a mandarin collared shirt and make out with your mother or something, we’re all very tired.

sad FLOP

 

Mark Fisher's death

_______INSERT_______

A foul way to start what already felt like a limp year. I can still feel the centre of gravity plunge into my feet on the top floor of the K’Damm Zara as I stared into my sweaty palm at a stream of heartbroken tweets last January. I never met Mark but admired his work (particularly his writing on the politicisation of mental health) and the way he dealt with life until he no longer could.

sadsadsad

 

Frieze Art Fair

_______INSERT_______

Mostly for my liver. Art fairs induce a kind of temporary learned helplessness alcoholism in me. 

sad FLOP

 

Earning a living wage in the art world

_______INSERT_______

lol maybe next year

sad FLOP

 

 

 

Robert Schulte, Online Redakteur von Spike

 

Oscar Tuazon, Firebuilding (Burn the Framewrok)
Skulptur Projekte Münster

_______INSERT_______

Es war ein regnerischer, trauriger Tag an jenem letzten Wochenende der Skulptur Projekte Münster, und ich musste die am Rand der Stadt liegenden Arbeiten mit dem Auto besuchen. Bei Tuazons Firebuilding (Burn the Framework), ein Betonmonument als Treffpunkt mit Feuerstelle, war niemand. Ich stieg aus, lief durch den Matsch und verliebte mich ein wenig. In dieser Industriebrache gelegen und mittlerweile mit Graffiti eingefärbt, sah es aus wie das Relikt einer längst vergessenen urbanen Utopie, und diese Fiktion erinnerte mich an die Zukunft.

smiley TOP 

 

Luca Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name

_______INSERT_______

Der Film von Luca Guadagnino erzählt die Liebe von Elio und Oliver während eines Sommers in Italien. Und wenn man sagt, dass Bild, Ton, Worte so etwas nicht erzählen können, weil sie nicht ausreichen, um Gefühle, besonders die Liebe, wiederzugeben, dann stimmt das. Call Me By Your Name kommt dem so nah.

smiley TOP 

 

Der Open Letter

_______INSERT_______

Ob als Open-Doc, an dem die Aufgebrachten gleichzeitig schreiben, als Anklage nach Ende von Ausstellung und Vergabe des Preises, oder bloß in seiner Häufigkeit: Der Open Letter ist 2017 das Instrument der Wahl, um geshared und gelesen zu werden. Das effekthaschende Format hebt auch die belanglosesten Beiträge auf Augenhöhe des Diskurses.

sad FLOP

 

Unaufrichtigkeit

_______INSERT_______

Es gab so viel zu sehen, zu hören und zu lesen. Das Meiste ist vermittelt durch Unaufrichtigkeit. Warum fragen wir nicht, weshalb die Galerie wirklich schließen musste? Können wir den Verantwortlichen nicht sagen, dass die Ausstellung langweilig ist, beim Talk nichts rum kam, der Text dumm ist? Vielleicht nicht. Aber wenn, vielleicht gäbe es dann endlich weniger zu sehen, zu hören und zu lesen.

sad FLOP

 

 

 

Klaus Speidel, Philosoph und Kunstkritiker

 

Hamamness von Nuray Demir, Wiener Festwochen

_______INSERT_______

Die Installation von Nuray Demir bei den Wiener Festwochen, wo so ruhig und inklusiv über Exklusion gesprochen und massiert wurde, dass auch ein weißer Cis-Mann nicht nur zum Schämen, sondern auch zum Nachdenken Zeit fand. 

smiley TOP 

 

Die Performance von Oleg (Terry Notary) in Ruben Östlunds The Square 

_______INSERT_______

Eine Szene, die so brutal schön die Möglichkeit von Kunst gegen Sponsoren, Kuratoren und Mitglieder von Fördervereinen vorführt, macht nostalgisch und erinnert an Zeiten, wo auch echte Künstlerinnen noch den Mut hatten, die Hand zu beißen, die sie fördert.

smiley TOP 

 

_______INSERT_______

Ai Weiwei, Law of the Journey 
Nationalgalerie Prag, 17.3.2017–7.1.2018

Wegen des typischen Missverhältnisses zwischen Idee und Okkupation von Raum und Zeit. Ja, die Flüchtenden können wie eine schwarze Masse erscheinen, die Europa torpediert. Aber mussten wir es auf 70 Metern Länge in Ai Weiweis „bislang größtem Kunstwerk“ vorgeführt bekommen? Ambiguität mag für große Kunst konstitutiv sein, aber nicht jedes ambige Kunstwerk ist ein großes. Was wir hier vorgeführt bekommen ist reinste Semantik: Ein kleiner Elefant bleibt ein großes Tier, und auch manch großes Werk bleibt kleine Kunst.

sad FLOP

 

Die Debatte um Dana Schutz’ Malerei Open Casket

_______INSERT_______

Weil sie die Identität der Künstlerin, aber nicht das Werk thematisierte.

sad FLOP