Mary Heilmann
“To Be Someone”
The New Museum
October 22, 2008 – January 26, 2009
Encountering them at messy biennials and in crowded fairs, I had come to think of Mary Heilmann’s clear and fresh paintings as wonderful palate cleansers. That feeling was confirmed by this retrospective, which served them up on two floors, together with matching chairs and ceramics, until the whole thing felt like a big banquet of sherbet.
Elizabeth Peyton
“Live Forever”
The New Museum
October 8, 2008 – January 11, 2009
I enjoyed remembering how these paintings first imposed themselves on the art world, and I could still dissolve into their quick and rosy celebrity. I even liked all the thin lips, and how the exhibition’s visitors mostly resembled Peyton’s own androgynous subjects. It was only when I got to reading the title cards—whose recurrent theme is “referring to famous people by their first names (but including their full names in parentheses)”—that I wanted to break walls and run.
“William Eggleston: Democratic Camera”
Whitney Museum of American Art
November 7, 2008 – January 25, 2009
Eggleston manages to romanticize the South without making it attractive. Growing up in a different region, I remember seeing a cheery advertisement from Ohio’s board of tourism, inviting people to “the heart of it all” for vacation, and asking my mother who would ever fall for our ridiculous slogan. Here, that kind of ad is used against itself: all the local color is intentionally heightened, which deftly exposes the melancholy heart of it.
Alexander Calder
“The Paris Years, 1926 – 1933”
Whitney Museum of American Art
October 16, 2008 – February 15, 2009
With the tiny video screens set on loop and the stuffed animals set back in glass cages, this show turned a low-tech, bohemian circus into a hi-tech, corporate zoo. I left with the sad feeling that Calder’s Parisian spectacle was what we used to call a location joke—you had to be there.
Tara Donovan
ICA Boston
October 10, 2008–January 4, 2009
When an enormous, gorgeously shifting, impossibly amber wall turns out to be made entirely of plastic straws, the 21st Century viewer can’t help but pause in wonder and admiration. But this descends pretty quickly into the parlor game of, “What’s this one made of?” It may be magical and impressive that thousands of plastic cups can be deployed to remind us of the snowy Alps, or that shiny buttons can be stacked into stalagmites, but it’s clear that Donovan herself is still working out what else it is.
“Momentum 12: Gerard Byrne”
ICA Boston
November 12, 2008 – March 1, 2009
It seems enough to say, as the show catalogue does, that this installation “explores the legend of Scotland’s Loch Ness monster through photography, film, and text.”
“The 2008 James and Audrey Foster Prize”
ICA Boston
November 12, 2008 – March 1, 2009
If a contemporary art prize in Boston sounds like a contradiction in terms, it stands to reason. A city that trains young artists at several major art schools doesn’t show much interest when they’re no longer students. That might be why the ICA’s website assures us that Catherine D’Ignazio, Rania Matar, Andrew Witkin, and Joe Zane “all share a confident artistic approach.”
They won’t share the $25,000 prize, though. I’d give it to Joe Zane. Along with a deflated balloon bearing the ICA logo and a painting that says “I love you, too” in Italian, he’s made a plaster version of the prize trophy—all of which demonstrates an ambivalence clearly in need of recognition.
Kehinde Wiley
“The World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar”
The Studio Museum in Harlem
July 17 – October 16, 2008
Somebody told me they saw some of these in a music executive’s office, which makes perfect sense.
—Dushko Petrovich