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Reading the Palace
This year's director of the Venice Biennale, Massimiliano Gioni, has titled the main exhibition "The Encyclopedic Palace:" in other words, a Museum of Everything. Indeed, the grandiosity of the concept could have easily concealed a too-vague means of snapshotting a curator's anxious, up-to-the-second notion of "the contemporary." Yet Gioni, associate director and director of exhibitions at New York's New Museum, is too clever to make such a fatal mistake. Armed with an airtight sense of purpose, an artist's eye and an awareness of the subversive powers of subtlety, his palace could be taken as a model for all those skeptic-idealists who cling to the demand that a biennial should not be an ordeal to traverse. It includes artists from the anti-canon of so-called outsider art—including Shinichi Sawada, Hilma af Klint and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein—as well as more renegade art world insider-outsiders, such as Dieter Roth, Maria Lassnig and R. Crumb.
Venice Biennale, The Nationals: Nordic Pavilion
For those who have the 55th Venice Biennale on their itineraries, we offer quick picks in the form of slide shows, appearing over the coming days, of one- and two-person shows at the national pavilions. With 88 countries participating, 10 for the first time, it's impossible to be comprehensive. So we aim to serve visitors with limited time, attending just the two main venues: Giardini and Arsenale. Wherever you wander in Venice, however, keep your eyes peeled for the red Biennale logo, signaling nationals tucked into churches and palazzi.
Photos by Paola Ferrario. Read More
The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won't Want to Miss
With an ever-growing number of galleries scattered around New York, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Where to begin? Here at A.i.A., we are always on the hunt for thought-provoking, clever and memorable shows that stand out in a crowded field. Below is a selection of current shows our team of editors can't stop talking about.
This week we check out Ugo Rondinone's army of stone people at Gladstone Gallery, iconic early work by Richard Serra at David Zwirner and loosely connected work by seven photographers at Callicoon Fine Arts. Read More
Abraaj Group Art Prize Winners Announced
The Abraaj Group Art Prize has announced its five winners for 2014. The awardees each receive $100,000 and create an artwork that will debut at the Art Dubai fair in March 2014. Read More
Contingent Views: Dance at the Kitchen
The jpeg is terribly low quality. Seen on the website of the Kitchen, New York's foremost venue for multidisciplinary performance, and zoomed in to 200 percent, the gray lettering is still barely visible. Straining, one finds that the image depicts only text: 16 phrases written out in four quartets that merely describe rules for creating a hypothetical photograph. Directives range from the straightforward ("interior shot"), to the cloyingly poetic ("the image must include a secret"), and the self-consciously absurd ("must not contain an image of a refrigerator nor its parts"). Faced with the prospect of choosing a single press image to represent their work, the artists who performed at this year's Dance and Process (June 7-8) elected to circulate in advance only this elliptical list of interdictions-a decision that captures the tone of their performances. Read More
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Currently on view in the group show "Redux" at New York's Cristin Tierney Gallery (through Feb. 4) are two works by Joe Fig, both related to his 200
