![]() ![]() It’s in the exhibition’s catalogue too, which-as published by Cricoteka, a museum devoted to the storied Polish theater director Tadeusz Kantor but home to other exhibitions too-charts the history of Druga Grupa in English and Polish both. “But there was no First Group.” A lot of what I’ve come to love about the wry black-comic sensibility I’ve gleaned from so many Polish people I’ve met during travels there was baked into that one interaction. “Well, their name translates as Second Group,” the attendant said. After wandering around the show in a state of fruitful confusion, I asked a museum attendant about some of the particulars to make sure I wasn’t mistaking what seemed to be so smart but also so expressly funny and strange. Among the works in the show I saw in Krakow were an elaborate array of documentation for a Land Art project that turned out to be fake (what an idea!) and an empty mattress covered with projections of sprawled-out body shapes under sheets beamed from an overhead lens onto the bed below. One of my favorite shows of the year was a retrospective of Druga Grupa, a ‘70s-era Polish art group that mixed heady conceptual gambits with a wily sense of farce and play. Alex Greenbergerĭruga Grupa: We’d Done All That Was to Be Done (Okreg Krakowski/Cricoteka) Let’s hope for a second edition that includes Hannah Black’s open letter about Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, some of Hito Steyerl’s essays, and other more recent efforts. Reaching as far back as the workings of the 1950s Japanese avant-garde collective Hi-Red Center, The Anti-Museum intelligently draws a line between institutional critique of yesteryear and work by younger artists in the present, among them Zach Blas, Mai-Thu Perret, and Pussy Riot. ![]() ![]() It opens with what editor Mathieu Copeland calls “A Retrospective of Closed Exhibitions”-a look back at shows that involved shutting down a space, the most recent of which was a 2016 Maria Eichhorn project for which the Chisenhale Gallery in London closed for nearly a month and all its employees were sent on paid vacation. No one would expect an anthology about institutional critique to be easy reading, but The Anti-Museum, in all its 800-page glory, is an engaging tome. Mathieu Copeland and Balthazar Lovay (Fri Art and König Books) Here are some favorites from 2017, as selected by the editors and writers of ARTnews, with an eye for variety in mind. Books abound, and many good ones at that. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |