After this roller coaster ride of an election year, it’s hard to know where to begin but art–and what artists have to say–is something we need more than ever right now. Artists are fearless. They see things in ways mere mortals can’t, and they speak and reveal a kind of truth, one that can heal as well as burn, that others wouldn’t dare to say. Despite all the political noise in 2016, there were some standout shows.
In Guston’s show at Hauser Wirth’s temporary 22nd Street location (and Dia:Chelsea’s former home), next door to its new building under construction, more than 150 Richard Nixon–loathing pictures hang in a continuous line, one satirizing tragicomic image after another, adding more fuel to the ever-fascinating story of Tricky Dick. The show went up just before the election, and it vibrates with more relevance every day. Written on one gallery wall is a quote from Guston: “So when the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” Every artist should run to see this show before it closes on January 14.
Not only is Cattelan’s show at the Guggenheim a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal (Fountain) and a dramatic return to the art world after Cattelan’s five-year hiatus, it sends a decisive democratic message. A solid, 18-carat gold object that would look right at home at Casa Trump or in any self-respecting 1 percenter’s palace—this is a toilet for the masses. A guard stands outside the door of the Guggenheim’s fourth-floor loo, making sure no user stays longer than three minutes but allowing time for each to have an intimate, private experience with an artwork. Cattelan, along with Diesel, will be partying on Friday night from 10:00 p.m. on at a special evening called “Flush and Repeat” at 219 Second Avenue, celebrating the 15,000 flushes so far since it was christened in September. The dress code is “underwear.” Cattelan himself will be wearing “a jacket and a gold thong,” of course. The museum is projecting 73,000 users by the end of the first year. “America” will be installed through mid-2017, unless a lender steps forward to make it permanent.
Hard to believe, but this treasure of a show at the Morgan Library Museum—about 100 rip-roaringly adventurous drawings, often dealing with the quotidian—is the artist’s first museum retrospective of works on paper. To hell with conventional notions of good taste—Dubuffet dug deep to make these magically unexpected, graffiti-inspired drawings. On view through January 2.
I didn’t know the work of Forrester, who turned 60 this year and who had two shows running concurrently in New York and London. The one in New York, at White Columns, is curated by Peter Doig and Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns. (The one in London, at Tramps, is curated by Doig.) Both feature work from the 1980s. The New York work highlights Forrester’s on-the-spot paintings and drawings of London’s nascent reggae scene, where he went to “all-night ‘blues’ clubs.” White Columns show on view through December 17. Tramps closed December 3.
An astounding overload of a show at the Guggenheim—in this case, more is resoundingly more—reveals this genius pair of philosophical funnymen as conjurors who turned the banal into the sublime, finding beauty in everyday ephemera. I went with artist Julie Mehretu on the last day, and we could have wandered for hours among the nonchronological installations and watched, transfixed, their hilarious, charming, Rube Goldberg–like film, The Way Things Go.
David Adjaye’s dramatic dark bronze, ziggurat-shaped sculpture of a museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., set among all those white marble national buildings, may have arrived half a century after the ’60s Civil Rights Movement, but it’s just in time for the new one. It answers once and for all the question of whether architecture can be art, and it’s also a dynamic backdrop for art and history.
Bad boy Picabia has been an artist’s artist for at least two decades, and the Museum of Modern Art has now officially anointed him a giant of modern and postmodern art with a survey of his work, on view through March 19. His wildly eclectic oeuvre proves that consistency, and a signature style, are for nerds. This past year MoMA has been hitting it out of the park, with one great show after another, from Degas’s monotypes to Kai Althoff’s cornucopia of surprises.
The third in a series of Phaidon megabooks, Vitamin P3 brings a scintillating and comprehensive contemporary blockbuster to your living room: more than 100 artists of all ages from 30-plus countries, nominated by an impressive team of curators, critics, and artists, are presented in alphabetical order. It may well be the best show in town.
Speaking of knocking it out of the park, The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Thelma Golden consistently opens our eyes to magnificent art, whether with older artists not widely known (Thomas, Stanley Whitney) or young artists in the museum’s residence program. Thomas, whose work was shown at the Studio Museum through October 30, was a late bloomer. She taught art to junior high school students in Washington, D.C., until 1960, and then spent the next 18 years painting increasingly gorgeous, color-saturated abstractions until her death in 1978. Today her work looks as fresh and original as anything else around.
LizWorks and Ippolita produced a walking exhibition of miniature sculptures on a charm bracelet by all of the artists above. It’s an instant collection, in an edition of 50.
Off to a great start, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new modern art wing at the old Whitney Museum opened with “Unfinished” and “Nasreen Mohamedi,” followed up with Diane Arbus’s early work, and is ending the year with the first museum retrospective by Kerry James Marshall. The grand old Met, meanwhile, kept pace with one scintillating show after the next. Among the highlights were “Jerusalem 1000–1400,” “Max Beckmann in New York,” and “Fragonard: Drawing Triumphant.”
For 16 days over the summer, more than 1.2 million spectators walked on Italy’s Lake Iseo, by way of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Floating Piers”, 100,000 square meters of miraculously engineered walkways covered in bright yellow-orange fabric. (The mountainous setting is thought to have been used by Leonardo Da Vinci in the background of the Mona Lisa.) This was Christo’s first large project since 2005’s “The Gates” in Central Park, and it is a staggeringly beautiful and wonderfully absurd spectacle that proved the most beloved and reviled public artist of our time is still in top form.
Swiss video artist Rist provides New Yorkers with an alternate reality at the New Museum, and not a moment too soon. If the political news is just too grim to bear, head for the Bowery, lie down on a cushion, and surrender to the sheer delight of immersive color, light, music, and fantasy. As a French art historian once said, “Museums console us for what we are by what we have been.” And will be again one day, let’s hope.