The Exhibitions That Defined the 2000s

Shanghai Biennale 2000

In the Chinese art world—both internally and in terms of its relationship to the global system—the year 2000 was a watershed, marked by two exhibitions that opened in Shanghai within days of each other. The provocatively titled “Fuck Off,” organized by artist Ai Weiwei and curator Feng Boyi, was promoted as “uncompromising and uncooperative” in the preface of its catalogue. Taking place in a grimy warehouse, the scrappy do-it-yourself roundup displayed a wide range of hastily assembled experiments, including a performance by artist Yang Zhichao, who endured without anesthesia the surgical implantation of wild grass into the flesh of his back. But “Fuck Off” was a capstone, not a catalyst, harking back—like several edgy satellite shows then on view—to the previous decade of hit-and-run displays of increasingly transgressive works that typified the 1990s.

The comparatively mild-mannered Shanghai Biennale, on the other hand, was a breakthrough in cultural diplomacy. Since the twice closed and reopened “China/Avant-Garde” at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, in 1989, it was the first large-scale exhibition in China to include formerly frowned-upon installation and video art, to be organized in part by overseas curators, and most important, to take place in a centrally located state-run institution. Mounted in the Shanghai Museum of Art, the show ushered in a decade of cooperation and détente between the government and the contemporary art community, exemplified by a welter of copycat biennales in cities all over China and high-profile overseas exhibitions, like “Living in Time” (2001) at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and “Alors, la Chine?” (2003) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, both sponsored by the ministry of culture.

Why the sea change? China’s economy was growing at record speed, its application to the World Trade Organization was pending, and so was its bid to host the Olympics. Achieving super-power status was the aim, and under the leadership of then President Jiang Zemin, culture was part of the plan. The Shanghai city government shared these ambitions. The goal was to recuperate the city’s past position (in the 1920s and ‘30s) as the most cosmopolitan commercial center in Asia, if not the world. Consequently, investment in infrastructure was frantic. Futuristic skyscrapers, five-star hotels, and a massive opera house arose overnight, as did an enormous international airport.

For many people in the visual arts community, mainstream and marginal alike, this was the big chance, and they, too, worked furiously behind the scenes. Progressives sought to bring contemporary art above ground, to raise its visibility, and to engage a wider public—in short, to normalize new art practices. As a result, two highly experienced international curators, Hou Hanru (then resident in Paris) and the Tokyo-based Toshio Shimizu, were appointed to join the museum team, bringing their vision of diversity and openness to an Asian-led era of international exchange and advancement. And while concessions were evident, like the inclusion of academic oil and ink painting favored by the conservative wing of China’s art establishment, the result was nonetheless revelatory, at least to most local audiences. Indonesian artist Heri Dono’s wide-eyed angels flapped overhead in a long corridor hung with Marlene Dumas’s ink and acrylic apparitions; William Kentridge’s shadowy animations flickered in darkened halls alongside Mariko Mori’s glowing body capsules and Zhang Peili’s suspended video screens. Another not-so-hidden agenda was also clear: some 80 percent of the artists were Asian, and 60 percent were Chinese. The dominance of the Euro-American canon was in question, and Asia, starting with China, was ready to take the challenge.

Twenty years later, is Asia in the vanguard with China at the helm? The jury is out, but the perspective of a key artist is haunting. Creating one of the most ambitious and prominently displayed works in the Biennale, Huang Yong Ping built a giant sand model of one of Shanghai’s most renowned (and still extant) colonial-period buildings. This grand Neo-Classical edifice once housed the headquarters of a major British bank, and after the 1949 revolution, Shanghai’s Communist government. More recently, the building had reverted back to a bank, this time the local institution charged with financing the rise of Shanghai’s newest business district, Pudong. Throughout the course of the exhibition, Huang’s Bank of Sand crumbled.

Today, China has achieved super-power status—yet, as in many other countries, the space of the permissible is shrinking. The Shanghai Biennale, opening its thirteenth edition this month, has become an increasingly exceptional carve-out, a special artistic zone where adventurous programming is supported, at least for the time being.

—Jane DeBevoise

Greater New York

In February 1999, MoMA and PS1 Contemporary Art Center announced their partnership; a year later, their first joint venture, the survey “Greater New York,” opened, beating that year’s edition of the establishment Whitney Biennial by a month. With no theme other than “what it means to be in New York at the beginning of a new era,” “Greater New York” allowed itself to be charmingly incohesive, brushing off any threat of enforced conservatism from mother MoMA. The only connection between the 140 artists, selected from an open call in addition to research by a team of PS1 and MoMA curators, was that they live in New York City or within commuting distance, and had not had a solo show in the city before 1995. That five–year gap of “emergence” allowed for better-known names showing now-signature works such as Ghada Amer, Cecily Brown, Mark Lombardi, Julie Mehretu, Rob Pruitt, Do Ho Suh, and Lisa Yuskavage, set against artists such as Yael Bartana, Emily Jacir, and Daniel Lefcourt, who were participating in their first major exhibition. Typical of the show’s irreverence was Pia Lindman’s Public Sauna, which required any participants to strip bare in the museum’s courtyard in full view of visitors in order to enjoy a tiny sauna and have a bucket of cold water dumped over their head upon exit.

But the work itself was overshadowed by the celebration of newness—this new institutional model, the new millennium, a New York optimistically emerging from the devastation of AIDS crisis unaware that 9/11 was just around the corner. The lasting legacy of the show was its democratic approach not just to the art, but to the production of knowledge around it in two egalitarian strategies. First, the museum created Hotmail addresses for the show’s artists and then displayed them on the wall labels, checklists and website, so that any member of the public (and far more likely, intrepid dealers and curators) could be in contact. Even more generous (though likely unpaid) was the open call format for texts responding to works in the exhibition; those accepted were not published in the unfussy catalogue but collected in an accompanying CD-ROM and on the website. The show was a blockbuster for P.S.1, and a feel-good beginning for the MoMA partnership.

“Greater New York” was not founded as a quinquennial, but the form proved too successful not to continue. It also contributed enormously to the early 2000s MFA market boom. At the opening of the 2005 edition, dealers were scrawling their names on the wall labels to claim artists for their roster. That exhibition continued in the boisterous, heterogenous form of its predecessor, with even more artists (162!), but solidified its talent-scouting authority with a textbook-sized catalogue. By the 2010 edition, after some lessons learned from the 2008 economic crash, the event took a far more restrained form with sixty-eight artists. The installation—particularly the third-floor galleries with streamlined matchings of artists such as Erin Shirreff, Naama Tsabar, and Zak Prekop, or Michele Abeles and Nick Mauss—felt much more in line with a generation of artists expected to be professionalized by the time of their MFA thesis shows. Circling back to 2000 in light of our current biennial fatigue, the exhibition’s formlessness unwittingly provided a model for curatorial modesty and collaborative communication.

—Lumi Tan

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China

Twenty years ago, anyone attending or reading about shows of Chinese contemporary art in the West could be forgiven for thinking that the radical new art in China—which equally eschewed traditional landscape painting, the Socialist Realism long sanctioned by Mao Zedong, and the prettified French Academy–style “naturalism” first learned before China’s Cultural Revolution—was primarily of three types. There was the caricature-like figurative painting practiced by artists like Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogong, and Wang Guangyi, often centering on big faces and promoted under catchy rubrics like Cynical Realism and Political Pop. There were massive installations by artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang (stuffed animals and gunpowder explosions), Gu Wenda (human hair), and Xu Bing (fake-language panels and scrolls). And there were nearly maniacal performances, like those of Zhang Huan, hanging in chains from the ceiling of his studio and being bled by doctors; He Yunchang entombing himself in a concrete monolith for twenty-four hours; and Yang Zhichao having his shoulder seared with a hot branding iron—that sort of thing.

Then, in 2004, came the illuminating exhibition “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China.” Co-organized by University of Chicago professor Wu Hung and International Center of Photography curator Christopher Phillips (a former senior editor at A.i.A.), the survey comprised 130 works by sixty Chinese artists. It debuted at the International Center of Photography and the Asia Society, both in New York, and toured to six other museums in the United States and abroad. The vision it delivered was that of a nation utterly transformed both physically and socially. Photographs by Zhang Dali and Sze Tsung Leong showed historic neighborhoods reduced to rubble to make way for soaring modern towers; Rong Rong and Xing Danwen documented the renegade life of their artist friends in the squalor of Beijing’s self-styled East Village; Liu Zheng turned his lens on everyone from professional village mourners to convicts to decadent businessmen; Wang Qingsong staged elaborate scenes melding Chinese history and folklore with contemporary life.

Videos in the show ranged from raw exposés to consumerist satires to avant-garde mind games. In Xu Zhen’s Rainbow (1998), a male torso progressively reddens from a long series of unseen slaps. Cui Xiuwen’s Ladies’ Room (2000) secretly records chic “hostesses” primping and gossiping in the bathroom of a high-end Beijing club. Rabid Dogs (2002), by Cao Fei, features Burberry-clad young people, made up to resemble canines, roughhousing on hands and knees in an office strewn with food bowls and luxury-brand handbags. Yang Fudong’s Liu Lan (2003) moodily contemplates the impossibility of lasting romance between an urban, white-suited male fashion plate and an equally attractive but traditionally clad woman from the countryside.

In their interview in these pages [A.i.A., June/July 2004], Wu and Phillips noted that they accomplished their curatorial mission by completely ignoring officialdom in the People’s Republic of China. Their show—and the freewheeling method behind it—was a timely triumph of artistic globalism, concurrent with a briefly roaring market for Chinese contemporary art abroad, before the Great Recession of 2008 and the nearly worldwide retreat into so-called populist (actually nativist) enclaves. “Between Past and Future” accurately reflected both the burgeoning world-awareness in China and the increasingly conceptual nature of photography and video there in the early 2000s. The survey traced those developments from their 1970s photojournalist origins to the threshold of the computer- and internet-based art that today most forcefully counters the Great Firewall and the increasingly conservative (which in China means Party-centric) and nationalistic (verging on xenophobic) cultural policies of the current government in Beijing.

—Richard Vine

Ecstasy: In and About Altered States

Visitors to a sprawling 2005 exhibition at MoCA’s Geffen Contemporary could never be certain if they were viewing a sober study of the historical role of mind-altering substances in artistic creation, or simply lost in an environment meant to be experienced on actual drugs. A sparkling crystal fountain detailed with intricate Victorian flourishes met museumgoers at the entrance to “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States.” Klaus Weber’s Public Fountain LSD Hall (2003) was surrounded by a plexiglass barrier and included a label warning visitors that the water trickling through his immaculate structure had been dosed with a certain amount of LSD. Intrepid visitors to LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art could, at least in theory, sneak a drink from the fountain to heighten their perceptions of the show. Or, more tantalizingly, all the flowing, churning, splashing water, suggested that perhaps the drug was already in the air.

Curators Paul Schimmel and Gloria Sutton argued in their catalogue essays and exhibition texts for “Ecstasy” that the early 2000s drug culture belonged to a tradition of artists seeking transcendence, as seen in everything from ’60s psychedelia to the Baroque splendor of Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy to the poetry of ancient cults of Dionysus.

As Christopher Bradford put it the magazine X-TRA, “a cursory stroll through the carnivalesque installation reveals the exhibition as more playground for the psychoactive mind than interrogation of perception or metaphysics.” The warehouse-like spaces came to resemble Wonderlands and headshops. Assume Vivid Astro Focus filled a gallery with neon lights and trippy wall paintings: a clublike setting conducive to maximizing the effects of the show’s eponymous substance. Carsten Höller’s Upside-Down Mushroom Room, where visitors had to navigate through a stoner’s fantasy of giant red-capped ’shrooms hanging from the ceiling. Other works nodded to the California Light and Space Movement. With his LED installation MATRIX II (2000/05) Erwin Redl created an immersive experience in which points of green light suggested an infinite space.

The brilliance of “Ecstasy” lay in its ambition to create an art historical and intellectual framework for experiences meant to transcend the intellect. Were this tension to dissipate, however, the results would risk becoming, well, stupid.  Meow Wolf and the Museum of Ice Cream can be considered the exhibition’s anti-intellectual heirs. Like those ecstatic art-entertainment-shopping funhouses, “Ecstasy” was eminently instagrammable five years before the launch of Instagram. In hindsight, the most apparent curatorial oversight was the lack of a Yayoi Kusama “Infinity Room” of the sort that LA museumgoers lined up to see at the Broad in 2019.

“Ecstasy” made drug culture seem like transgressive fun, though it is clear now that a truly conscientious show on the subject might have done more to explore the brutal toll of addiction at a time when an opioid pandemic was under way. Since that time, the dangerous allure of Weber’s fountain has somewhat faded. Though experienced psychonauts might have been familiar with the notion of microdosing back in the aughts, the practice of ingesting very small amounts of LSD became a fad for Millennial office workers in the 2010s, the drug harnessed for a more productive and relaxed workday. No longer merely a transgressive kick, a drink of Weber’s water might soon be a corporate perk.

—William S. Smith

Part Object Part Sculpture

According to curator Helen Molesworth, the art in her 2005 exhibition “Part Object Part Sculpture” can make “the hairs on the beholder’s neck stand on end, summoning unconscious thoughts of the hidden recesses and pleasures of the body.” Filled with swarms, accumulations, and abject forms, the exhibition at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, offered a revisionist history of twentieth-century sculpture, casting uncanny sensation in a leading role. The “Duchampian genealogy” that Molesworth aimed to create foregrounded the work of women artists: Louise Bourgeoise, Lee Bontecou, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, and Rachel Whiteread. Bruce Nauman and Felix Gonzalez-Torres were among the few American men with work in the show, which seemed designed to bring the full strangenessof postwar Italian art into view with pieces by Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana, and Alberto Burri.

Notably absent from “Part Object Part Sculpture” were the familiar heroes of Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptualism. The Duchampian readymade, in Molesworth’s telling, was not as an invitation to mimic capitalistic production, as Andy Warhol did, nor to replicate the aesthetics of industry, as did Donald Judd, nor to participate in a cerebral game about the nature of art as Joseph Kosuth proposed. Instead, she found in Duchamp’s work a tangle of compulsive behavior and erotic content. Kusama’s bulbous forms, Hesse’s soft surrealist constructions, and Bontecou’s voids best embody Duchamp’s idiosyncratic, spine-tingling legacy.

As a curator, Molesworth has a knack for locating practices once thought to be marginal and showing how they encapsulate major cultural themes. It’s hard to remember now that Kusama was hardly a household name in 2005, much less a global brand. “Part Object Part Sculpture” followed Molesworth’s “Work Ethic” (2003) at the Wexner, an exhibition that brought to light overlooked histories of labor. This approach found expression again in the 2019 exhibition “One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art,” Molesworth’s final effort as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Los Angeles. The show borrowed its subtitle from Farber’s famous term for movies that shrugged off self-serious grandeur in order to burrow into history from the edges.

Looking back at “Part Object Part Sculpture,” the animating debates about the legacy of Duchamp in Euro-American art can feel a little parochial within a now fully globalized art world. Writing in Artforum Carrie Lambert-Beatty knocked the exhibition for continuing to assert Duchamp’s singular presence and the patrimonial view of art history. But “Part Object Part Sculpture” exemplifies a method that remains influential today: pulling from the margins (wherever they are) to improve understanding of the center—or, more than that, challenge its authority. At the Wexner, Molesworth proved that underdogs can sometimes win.

—William S. Smith

Cady Noland Approximately

After Cady Noland withdrew from the art world in the late 1990s, her absence seemed to intensify. Dealers told stories of her refusing permission to show or publish her existing work. Worry that she had abandoned art-making at a moment of tremendous critical and commercial success grew alongside earnest praise from emerging artists like Josephine Meckseper, Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker, and Banks Violette. There was a large, mostly permanent installation in collectors Don and Mera Rubell’s private Miami museum. But for the most part, the early 2000s were a bleak time for anyone who wanted actually to see Noland’s work.

The 2006 exhibition “Cady Noland Approximately,” at Triple Candie in Harlem, was the loudest scream into the Noland void. The nonprofit art space run by Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett commissioned artists to fabricate thirteen “approximations” of Noland’s sculptures using only online images and information. The show’s checklist contained exhaustive explanations of how these constructions diverged from Noland’s originals: changed scale, different models of stanchions or plastic sawhorses, unidentifiable elements in a milk crate sculpture. Any thought that the famously exacting artist might have been involved in the show was dispelled by the awkward installation; everything was crammed into one end of the gallery’s cavernous industrial space, and a pile of detritus and Budweiser cases, artfully lit, occupied the gallery’s back room.

“Cady Noland Approximately” was one of three Triple Candie exhibitions that year focused, according to Bancroft and Nesbett, on “addressing inaccessible content,” each using a different mode of misrepresentation. Billed as the artist’s first show in Harlem since 1969, “Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses: Two Scale Models” featured maquettes used to plan the artist’s 1998 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. For “David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective,” Xeroxed pages of brochures, webpages, and Rousing the Rubble—the lone, out-of-print monograph on Hammons’s work—ringed the walls. The show followed five years during which the gallery unsuccessfully invited the Harlem-based artist to do a project. In each of these “inaccessible content” shows, Bancroft and Nesbett said, patently inauthentic objects were deployed to create “an authentic but destabilized viewer experience” in which the gallerists could critique expensively produced museum spectacles, hagiographic retrospectives, and the art world’s commercial obsessions.

Critical reaction was generally negative, ranging from concern about misguided admiration to outrage at forgery. Noland didn’t see the show, but a friend of the artist came, a curator at a downtown museum who screamed: “This is not what Cady would want!” Nesbett’s reply: “Why does it matter what she wants?”

It turns out Noland didn’t need anyone’s help. The institutions she’d shunned also missed her, and were eagerly accumulating her work. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, acquired forty Nolands between 2004 and 2009, including Tanya as Bandit (1989), a metal-and-fabric panel bearing a silkscreened image of kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. This was a gift from trustee Kathy Fuld and her husband, Richard, in 2007, right before the investment bank he ran, Lehman Brothers, collapsed and precipitated a global financial meltdown.

Triple Candie’s shows were part of a trend for restaging that complicated the artist-curator dynamic. Examples include Marina Abramović’s 2005 re-performance of other artists’ works at the Guggenheim Museum and the 2013 remake of Harald Szeemann’s iconic 1969 group show, “When Attitudes Become Form,” which Germano Celant staged at the Prada Foundation in Venice with artist Thomas Demand and architect Rem Koolhaas. Perhaps an approximation of Noland’s 2019 retrospective at the MMK in Frankfurt can close the loop.

—Greg Allen

Seven Easy Pieces

Marina Abramović’s “Seven Easy Pieces”—a weeklong series of solo performances staged in November 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York—was a central event in the first “Performa” Biennial of Live Performance (organized then and now by director RoseLee Goldberg). While by no means the first large-scale live performance event at a major museum (another was the 2003 “Live Culture” initiative at Tate Modern, London, which offered a conference and live performances by artists and collectives including Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra, Forced Entertainment, and many others), “Seven Easy Pieces” emphatically confirmed the incursion of performance into the space and logic of the “high art” museum, for better or worse. The project was a harbinger of the problems incurred with the wholesale incorporation of performance into the traditional visual arts institution—including the inevitable clash between the spontaneity claimed for live art and the reifying tendencies of the art museum. These contradictions reached their apotheosis with Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2010. The capstone of the latter exhibition, which took place in the citadel of high modernism, was the positioning of Abramović herself, immobile in the museum’s spectacular, klieg-light-adorned atrium, gazing at a long stream of visitors one by one as they sat facing her. (The process mirrored her earlier piece Nightsea Crossing, produced in partnership with Ulay in the 1980s).

With “Seven Easy Pieces” Abramović contributed substantially to what was then a burgeoning field of performance redos (including Yoko Ono occasionally reenacting her famous 1964 Cut Piece over the years, and the “Re-enact” performance festival in Amsterdam in 2004). She also provided valuable fodder for those exploring histories of performance art from the 1960s and 1970s and examining the conundrum of how to display and historicize live performance. Offering a deep investigation into what it means for one artist to redo the performance of another and for an artist to produce a new version of an older work of her own, for “Seven Easy Pieces” Abramović researched and re-performed five relatively well-known pieces by other artists from the history of Western performance art—artists who at that time were fairly canonical within developing studies of Euro-American performance and body art (Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Joseph Beuys)—and reworked her own 1975 Lips of Thomas. A different one of these works was reenacted by Abramović over a seven-hour period (from 5 PM to midnight) on each of six nights, with the seventh night (the seventh “easy piece”) featuring her newly commissioned Entering the Other Side (in which she inhabited a gargantuan blue dress, occupying the vortex-like center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous spiraling Guggenheim atrium).

Abramović’s placement front and center with this final “easy piece” asserted her authorship even as she claimed in the catalogue for the show and the Babette Mangolte film documenting the overall event to be scrupulously deferring to the original artists by getting their permission, paying them a copyright fee, and working to re-create the original energy and meaning of each “ephemeral” piece. In so doing she provided a majestic case study of the complex interrelations between performance and art institutions in the twenty-first century.

—Amelia Jones

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution

A major correction to the art historical record took place in the first decade of the 2000s. Feminist art entered the canon. As Lucy Lippard argued in a 2007 essay in this magazine, this was no easy undertaking. Feminist art is “hard to pin down, a moving target,” she wrote. “It was never an art movement per se, with all the implied similarities in style and esthetic breakthroughs, critical triumphs and post-coital exhaustion.” Instead, feminist art was defined by its approach: a broad commitment to social equality. By failing to fit into neat formalist categories, feminist art, according to Lippard, had not received its “art-historical due.”

That was the situation until 2007, a watershed year when major arts institutions began to settle this outstanding debt. In March, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened at the Brooklyn Museum. In addition to housing Judy Chicago’s monumental 8,300-square-foot The Dinner Party (1974–79), the center includes galleries to devoted to special exhibitions like the inaugural contemporary art survey “Global Feminisms.” Earlier that month, in Los Angeles, “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art before traveling to a number of other venues, including MoMA PS1 in New York.

Covering the years 1965–1980, “WACK!” had an ambitious agenda. In the catalogue, curator Connie Butler wrote that she aimed to “make the case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international ‘movement’ of any during the postwar period.” Yet the inclusion of scare quotes around “movement” signals some of the difficulties of this undertaking. How to define feminist art? Was all art by women inherently feminist? Could any art qualify so long as it was informed by feminist politics?

The show’s title evokes the ubiquitous acronyms that denoted the era’s activist groups: WAC, WAR, AWC. Militant journals and ephemera associated with such organizations filled vitrines, providing a common social context for galleries most striking for their aesthetic heterogeneity. There were explicitly activist works by the Guerrilla Girls but also abstract paintings by Mary Heilmann and a brightly colored poured latex floor piece by Lynda Benglis. The show, which was international in scope (even if heavily weighted toward European and American artists), featured artists who were little known to US audiences at the time: Sanja Iveković, Marta Minujín, Zarina, Maria Lassnig. Butler also included artists like Marina Abramović who neither claimed nor disavowed the feminist label.

In its pluralistic selections, “WACK!” offered a way to overcome a longstanding binary in feminist art: a supposed conflict between biological essentialism and various critiques of gender as a social construct. Butler’s careful curation allowed the body-centric imagery evident in work by artists like Chicago to appeared within the same overarching context as the cerebral post-structuralism of Mary Kelly. 

The lasting influence of “WACK!” can be seen in a string of exhibitions in the 2010s that offered long overdue surveys of work by women artists. Zilia Sánchez, Carmen Herrera, and Luchita Hurtado were among those who received late-in-life retrospectives after decades of working in near obscurity. Though late is certainly better than never, the very belatedness of such projects speaks to ongoing structural challenges that the feminist movement seeks to overcome. A 1988 poster by the Guerrilla Girls catalogued “advantages” of being a woman artist. Number four on the acidly ironic list: “knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty.”   

—William S. Smith

Documenta, Sculpture Project Münster, Venice Biennale

In a rare alignment, the summer of 2007 brought three major international forums into view simultaneously: Documenta in Kassel, Sculpture Project in Münster, and the Venice Biennale. With 9/11 dwindling in the rearview mirror, the second Bush presidency winding down, the rise of autocracy and xenophobia not yet a fully realized crisis, and the world economy in a seemingly unstoppable climb, the best a global exhibition could do, it appears, was acknowledge, as humbly as was credible, an embarrassment of riches.

Studiously avoiding social or political themes, Documenta 12 curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack opened their telegraphically short catalogue essay with the disclaimer, “the big exhibition has no form.” Art at its best, they claimed, “communicates itself.” Testing that assumption, they mixed modern and contemporary artworks with historical ones—Persian miniatures, prints by Hokusai, a painting by Manet—and offered cross-generational and cross-cultural pairings, both sensible (Agnes Martin grids with Nasreen Mohamedi grids) and inadvisable (juvenilia by Peter Friedl with drawings by the fully adult Annie Pootoogook). Four artists’ works recurred in varying contexts, Kerry James Marshall’s most productively, as his paintings actively engage historical precedents. “The Migration of Forms,” the exhibition’s “banner,” was meant to suggest (in keeping with a dubious populism) that visual culture, everywhere and eternally, deploys a limited set of forms. But it was the migration of people, in a city with a large immigrant population and high unemployment, that made Kassel a potent setting for Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale. Anomalously provocative, Fairytale brought 1,001 Chinese visitors to the city in shifts, representing them before their arrival by the same number of antique chairs—striking symbols of dispossession. (In a sharply contrasting celebration of the culture of consumption, the curators invited superstar chef Ferran Adrià to give away dinner at his restaurant to a lucky few.)

In Münster, a smaller and less dourly modern city where the outdoor Sculpture Project has been staged every decade since 1977, holdovers from previous iterations—by the likes of Donald Judd, Jorge Pardo, Dan Graham, and Claes Oldenburg—were joined, at the behest of co-founder Kasper König and curators Britta Peters and Marianne Wagner, by thirty-five new works, including Hans-Peter Feldmann’s spiffily renovated public restrooms, Pawel Althamer’s bucolic path through wheat fields, and Mike Kelley’s petting zoo. Bruce Nauman’s Square Depression, proposed in 1977 and realized thirty years later, is a big concrete square of downward slanting triangular quadrants that dip 5½ feet deep at the center, from which point the perimeter is approximately at eye level. Nominally melancholic, this clever feat of spatial engineering provided one of the Project’s happier perceptual experiences—long since public art’s preferred effect.

Although it didn’t promise controversy either, the 2007 Venice Biennale, for which Robert Storr was artistic director, wound up mired in acrimony. Criticized, although not skewered, as safe, museum-like, and too American, the exhibition was titled “Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense,” and like Documenta, abjured tendentiousness. Painters abounded—Robert Ryman, Susan Rothenberg, Sigmar Polka—and artists were mostly dignified with solo exhibition areas. There were stylish videos by Yang Fudong, but also a harrowing one by Paolo Canevari, of a young man footing a skull as if it were a soccer ball in a war-torn lot in Belgrade. Hardly less grim, an exchange in Artforum between Storr and his Biennale’s critics began with the curator’s 8,000+-word letter to the editor upbraiding Jessica Morgan, Francesco Bonami, and Okwui Enwezor, who had all sharply disparaged his efforts; they replied in kind. Aspiring, maybe, to the importance of Thomas McEvilley’s 1984–85 duel with William Rubin in the same magazine, which reshaped thinking about the legacy of colonialism in modern art, the 2008 round of attacks veered instead toward the narrowly personal. Enwezor, who had been the director of Documenta in 2002 and would go on to direct the Venice Biennale in 2015, concluded by likening Storr to Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz. Unhelpful, for sure. Still, there was more passion in these letters than in any of the big 2007 exhibitions.

Documenta’s curators posed three questions as “leitmotifs”; the second—“What is bare life?”—quotes the influential leftist philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and refers roughly to a state of being that is outside political control. Agamben was lately in the news for denouncing the (conservative) Italian government’s response to the coronavirus as “techno-medical despotism,” an argument usually heard, in the US and elsewhere, from the right. Social distancing, Agamben believes, is a stalking horse for fascism: in the name of biosecurity, people have grown cravenly fearful, and “the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been crossed.” Scrambling the pandemic’s deeply dug-in politics, Agamben suggests, at the least, an argument for rattling ideological cages. On the evidence, the artworld of 2007 could have used some shaking.

—Nancy Princenthal

Artempo

This show’s subtitle, “Where Time Becomes Art,” could only hint—which is all virtually any tagline could do—at the wonderment viewers felt when seeing the exhibition. Jean-Hubert Martin and Mattijs Visser were credited as curators, but “Artempo” was really the brainchild of Belgian antiques dealer and interior designer Axel Vervoordt. In the elegantly worn rooms of the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, ritual masks, Madonnas, Buddhas, and mannequins used by seventeenth-century artists and anatomists commingled with works by El Anatsui, Anish Kapoor, Cai Guo-Qiang, Antoni Tàpies, and others. Sumptuously patterned textiles, both designed and collected by Mariano Fortuny, the polymath entrepreneur who inhabited the venue a century earlier, offered maximalist backdrops to further stimulate the sense of creative sensibilities proliferating across time. Minimalism cropped up from place to place, sometimes as art and sometimes as exhibition design. But instead of its usual associations—formal exploration, commentary on industrial mass production, the white cube’s cerebral austerity—it seemed to convey noble serenity, meditative wisdom. Vervoordt’s configurations followed the logic of the wonder cabinet, juxtaposing objects according to visual or semiotic affinities rather than historical or national ones. In the Renaissance this was considered a mode of study, but for audiences in Venice the effect was sensuous rather than erudite, delightfully drowning the biennial-hopper’s understanding of recent art in the palpable unfamiliarity of other centuries and cultures.

“Artempo,” a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale, drew huge crowds. Critics loved it too. Mark Godfrey, writing in Artforum, called it “the most riveting exhibition of the summer,” and Roberta Smith, in the New York Times, said it was “one of the most strange and powerful exhibitions I have seen.” Both compared the show favorably to the concurrent Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, which also placed contemporary art in dialogue with the kind of objects most museums present as anthropological artifacts, occupying the city’s nonart museums to do so. Artistic director Roger Buergel and curator Ruth Noack, critics agreed, applied this method without the deft sophistication of Vervoordt. They ventured it while clinging to the prudent sightlines of modern museology. Vervoordt channeled his expertise in creating lavish interiors for the homes of the wealthy into a more hedonistic kind of visitor experience. “Artempo” was so popular that it spawned five sequels, all at the Palazzo Fortuny during subsequent Venice Biennales, concluding with “Intuition” in 2017. But the show’s impact was felt more broadly in the curatorial trends of the next decade, exemplified most visibly in the work of Massimiliano Gioni and Jens Hoffmann, which eschewed the white cube and mingled pieces of disparate origins, enacting a sly and gentle critique of the twentieth-century museum and giving people the sensual pleasure they crave from art.

—Brian Droitcour

Prospect.1

Billed as the largest biennial of international art ever organized in the United States, Prospect.1 opened in November 2008 in New Orleans, a city that just three years prior had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina and subsequent levee failures. The location became as integral to the event as its scope. Led by artistic director and curator Dan Cameron, this first edition distributed the work of eighty-one artists, including eleven from Louisiana, throughout the city’s art institutions—among them the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), the Contemporary Arts Center, and the Historic New Orleans Collection. It also commissioned notable site-specific works, such as Wangechi Mutu’s Mrs. Sarah’s House and Nari Ward’s Diamond Gym: Action Network, both installed in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Plagued with destruction not long before, the Ninth Ward was rife with grief, anger, and a dogged perseverance at the time Prospect.1 opened. These sentiments were underscored in Mutu’s installation, constructed on a vacant lot that had once held the home of Sarah Lastie. The wife of the late Walter Lastie, a drummer for rock-and-roll pioneer Fats Domino, Sarah had seen her house destroyed by floodwater. Mutu’s “ghost house” stood as a reminder of all that had been lost to nature and negligence. Ward’s Diamond Gym, a large assemblage of mangled exercise equipment, packed a gut punch in juxtaposition to its surroundings, the former Battleground Baptist Church. Engulfing the viewer in the sounds of Buddhist chants and excerpts from some of the great speeches of the Civil Rights era, the installation made the life-and-death relationship between race and Hurricane Katrina at once visceral and spiritual.

A year prior, the Ninth Ward and Gentilly neighborhoods served as sites for Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot. A collaboration between Chan, the Classical Theatre of Harlem, and the New York–based art organization Creative Time, the four performances of Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play starred New Orleans–born actor Wendell Pierce. His portrayal of Vladimir brought solemnity to the character who would remain near the same tree for the duration of the play, awaiting that which did not arrive. The play’s meditation on the absurdity of the human condition became all the more poignant in light of New Orleans’s lost sociocultural ecosystem.

While Prospect.1 had no specific theme, the $3.5-million undertaking was conceived with the express purpose of reinvigorating the city by cultivating a new hub of cultural tourism. Not without its detractors, this approach influenced the way new art spaces would contextualize themselves either within or in opposition to the burgeoning art scene engendered by the biennial (now triennial). In the years following the advent of Prospect.1, artist-run spaces came to exert great influence on museum operations, and notable Louisiana-based artists like Willie Birch, whose large-scale charcoal drawings were shown in the Great Hall of the NOMA during Prospect.1, have garnered larger audiences as a result.

Later iterations of Prospect have not been as explicitly tied to the city’s revitalization narrative, but rather have addressed themes key to its historical legacy, such as slavery, colonialism, and environmental resilience—issues that are now current throughout the United States. Prospect’s championing of these themes, and of the American South as an artistic center, anticipated larger shifts in the contemporary art world over the last decade. In addition, the curatorial choice to exhibit Louisiana-based artists like Chandra McCormick, Keith Calhoun, Deborah Luster, and Garrett Bradley alongside those with existing global audiences such as Nicole Eisenman, Pope.L, Camille Henrot, John Akomfrah, and Theaster Gates has established an opportunity for experimentation among prominent local and regional voices in this decade.

Fostering a connection between Louisiana and the broader art market, Prospect.1 also initiated a recognizable shift toward the new in institutions such as NOMA and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. The 2008 event laid the groundwork for many exhibitions of contemporary art in the current moment as well as in the coming years. In a city otherwise so defined by its history, much still lies ahead.

—Kristina Kay Robinson

Tim Burton

In late 2009, MoMA was mobbed. Visitors lined up in numbers not seen at the museum since the blockbuster Picasso retrospective in 1980 and the 1992 Matisse survey. More than eight hundred thousand people came, all drawn to a relatively small and gloomy-looking gallery that contained a treasure chest of drawings, props, and memorabilia related to director Tim Burton’s cinematic universe. The exhibition traced the arc of Burton’s creative development, from teenage doodles to full-blown Hollywood blockbusters like Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice. Or, more accurately, it showed the artist scaling up from the page to the screen. His world of creative misfits and oddball rebels appeared mostly formed early on in his life. 

As Ken Johnson wrote in his New York Times review, unlike work by Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, who toy with popular culture, “What Mr. Burton does, rather, is pop culture.” The show was part of a broader trend of museums expanding their purviews in that direction. “Tim Burton” followed “The Art of the Motorcycle” at the Guggenheim Museum in 1998 and preceded Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum in 2011 and, perhaps most notoriously, Björk at MoMA in 2015. Was this “selling out? Sullying the halls of high culture? The debate might be moot, as art itself merges with popular culture, evidenced by Yayoi Kusama’s smash-hit Infinity Rooms. If there was scoffing in 2009, “Tim Burton” today looks like a show ahead of its time.

—William S. Smith

The Clock

Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour video installation, The Clock, had its 2010 premiere at White Cube in London and went on to win a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Comprising thousands of clips appropriated from films and television shows (Safety Last!, Gaslight, Double Indemnity; “Mission Impossible,” “ER,” “The X-Files”) produced over the previous hundred years, the compilation functions as a chronometer in itself, with depicted clocks and verbal references corresponding to the time at the viewer’s own location. Marclay’s obsessive montage was assembled over some two years in collaboration with six research assistants; Marclay edited this high-low material (Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet alongside forgettable commercial films) using a single aspect ratio. Collaborator Quentin Chiappetta provided expert linking of soundtracks, a key to the work’s immersive and eerily engaging polyvocal quality. Famously, The Clock holds spectators’ attention in a relentless grip through its suspension of resolution, stringing action along between and among various truncated scenes and gestures: a woman walks to a door in one scene and, after a cut, a couple exits a building; a man looks up from his watch and, in a subsequent shot, the camera scans an unrelated landscape.

The Clock has been compared to other works of appropriation-based durational video such as Douglas Gordon’s 1993 installation 24 Hour Psycho, a silent projection that extends the Hitchcock film into an all-day affair. However, The Clock’s treatment of time is quite different from that embraced by Gordon—or, for that matter, such auteurs of slowed-down cinema as Andy Warhol (Sleep, Empire) or Wang Bing (West of the Tracks). Over the course of his daylong video, Marclay does not make his viewer feel the lugubrious infinity of the here-and-now so much as its unbearable brevity and disconcerting ineffability.

“This is a time machine,” intones Rod Taylor in an excerpt from George Pal’s 1960 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel that appears at around 5:45 PM in The Clock. The statement is at once wittily overdetermined and slightly oppressive: sitting rapt in a dark gallery before a 12-by-21-foot projection, The Clock’s viewers know exactly what time it is, even as they observe the present moment slipping unceasingly away without the traditional cinematic payoff of a twist in the plot or, perhaps, a conclusion.

An immensely popular yet ambivalent commentary on the legacy of movies and television in the internet age, The Clock illustrates the technological mediation of contemporary life—in all its thoroughness, speed, and hypotactic accumulation of images. The aesthetics of the database take over, and the video’s thousands of protagonists each have only seconds to distinguish themselves. As director and critic Chris Petit opined, it’s like “YouTube for gallery space.”

—Lucy Ives

Okwui Enwezor: Making the Art World Global

When curator Okwui Enwezor died last year of cancer last year at age fifty-five, he was eulogized not only for his wit, gravitas, and charismatic curiosity, but for fundamentally reshaping his field. By wedding formal experimentation to a serious engagement with postcolonial history, he transformed curatorial expectations.

Documenta 11 in 2002 set the tone for the ongoing biennial boom. Enwezor treated the exhibition in Kassel, Germany, as the culmination of a series of conferences in locales from St. Lucia to New Delhi, a gesture of “deterritorialization” that also emphasized his commitment to understanding art as a kind of knowledge production, a means for grappling with the truths of a globalized world dominated by Eurocentrism. He selected far more filmmakers than painters, showing both experimental works and documentaries of life in the Third World. The program comprised more hours of footage than any viewer could reasonably watch, underscoring the exhibition’s embrace of pluralism.

“The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994” debuted at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich in 2001 and traveled to MoMA PS1 in New York in 2002. Enwezor’s survey didn’t present postcolonial Africa as a single story; instead, its attention to multiple perspectives and political realities dovetailed with its inclusion of diverse mediums: poster design and film, architecture, and conceptual art.

As an adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, Enwezor organized a pair of paradigm-shifting shows. “Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography” (2006) mixed conceptual work with fashion photography, photojournalism, and documentary, providing counternarratives to the images of suffering too often represented Africa in the popular media. “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” (2008), explored photography’s connection to memory and record-keeping, loss, and imagery—and argued that bureaucratic control would intensify as digital images proliferated. The show typified Enwezor’s complex critical position. He staked his career on photography—his breakout exhibition was “In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present,” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1996—but he never stopped questioning the foundations of the medium.

Some curators work as advocates, raising the profiles of underrecognized artists and histories. Others innovate the exhibition as a medium. For Enwezor, these two impulses were inseparable. He demonstrated that the presentation of artwork from outside the Eurocentric canon requires new ways of looking.

Public Art Revival

Among the significant developments in the art of the aughts was a resurgence of interest in large-scale public artworks. Rather than serving simply as urban decoration, these projects were often destinations in themselves: projects like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates, temporarily installed in Central Park in 2005, generated millions of dollars in tourism revenue for New York, while Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was an early social media hit.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates: Central Park, New York, 1979–2005 (2005)
For sixteen days in February 2005, the pathways of New York’s Central Park were lined with orange gates bearing lengths of fluttering fabric. Entirely self-financed, the Gates project was the culmination of a twenty-five-year-long campaign by the artists, who were repeatedly turned down by city officials until they found an advocate in the newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2006
Unveiled in Chicago’s Millennium Park in May 2006, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate—nicknamed “The Bean” because of its distinctive shape—is a massive curved volume of highly polished stainless steel, seamlessly welded to evoke the appearance of liquid mercury. Considered one of Kapoor’s most popular works, its irregular form produces warped reflections of visitors and the surrounding skyline.

Chris Burden, Urban Light, 2008
Comprising 202 antique cast-iron street lamps from the 1920s and ’30s arranged in a loose grid, Chris Burden’s Urban Light, installed outside the Wilshire Boulevard entrance of LACMA, is visible twenty-four hours a day, with the lights going on at dusk and off at dawn. According to the artist, the work is a “statement about what constitutes a civilized and sophisticated society: safe after dark and beautiful to behold.”