Tops & Flops 2017
![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.](https://spikeartmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_fix/public/users/shared/articles/images/eleta_sandra.jpg?itok=GD1adxSG "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](https://spikeartmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_fix/public/users/shared/articles/images/d14_nilima_sheikh_each_night_put_kashmir_in_your_dreams_installationview_benaki_c_stathis_mamalakis.jpg1440_0.jpg?itok=FXrYd-wj "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")
![Ai Weiwei "Law of the Journey" (2017), exhibition view](https://spikeartmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_fix/public/users/shared/articles/images/tereza-krenova-grand-opening-2017-12-.jpg?itok=AGTxgDS7 "Ai Weiwei "Law of the Journey" (2017), exhibition view")
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
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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.
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Wang Bing, Mrs. Fang, Dokumentarfilm (2017)
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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.
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Venedig Biennale / Die Pavillons
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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.
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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
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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.
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Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 15.9.–31.12.2017
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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.
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Memphis Greenspace, Inc., and other depositions of Confederate Monuments
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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."
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The sale of "Leonardo da Vinci's" Salvatore Mundi at Christie's
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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.
FLOP
Dean Kissick, Writer
Documenta 14, Athens/Kassel
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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.
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Pavilion of Shamans, Viva Arte Viva
57th Venice Biennale
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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.
FLOP
Ella Plevin, Writer and Stylist
A trunk full of slime eels exploding on an Oregon highway
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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
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Jenna Sutela, gutbrain queen
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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.
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Shooting Metahaven's Possessed
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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.
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Bitcoin Bros
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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.
FLOP
Mark Fisher's death
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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.
Frieze Art Fair
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Mostly for my liver. Art fairs induce a kind of temporary learned helplessness alcoholism in me.
FLOP
Earning a living wage in the art world
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lol maybe next year
FLOP
Robert Schulte, Online Redakteur von Spike
Oscar Tuazon, Firebuilding (Burn the Framewrok)
Skulptur Projekte Münster
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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.
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Luca Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name
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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.
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Der Open Letter
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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.
FLOP
Unaufrichtigkeit
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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.
FLOP
Klaus Speidel, Philosoph und Kunstkritiker
Hamamness von Nuray Demir, Wiener Festwochen
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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.
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Die Performance von Oleg (Terry Notary) in Ruben Östlunds The Square
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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.
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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.
FLOP
Die Debatte um Dana Schutz’ Malerei Open Casket
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Weil sie die Identität der Künstlerin, aber nicht das Werk thematisierte.
FLOP
