Agenda

1.Robert Lazzarini, brass knuckles (v), 2010

"Lush Life: An Exhibition in Nine Chapters," New York

June 17 – August 13, 2010

The premise is a nine-part exhibition inspired by an edgy crime thriller, promising equal parts complexity and intertextuality. The results, however, aren't quite as involved. "Lush Life: An Exhibition in Nine Chapters" is grouping of a nine loosely-themed summer shows scattered throughout New York's Lower East Side.

1.MadeIn, The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, 2010

"MadeIn: Don't Hang Your Faith on the Wall," Long March Space, Beijing

30 May – 8 August

MadeIn is a cultural production company founded a year ago by the Chinese experimental artist Xu Zhen. He founded the company in an attempt to define and combine his various outputs beyond his own artwork, such as the non-profit space BizArt, China's leading online contemporary art forum Art-Ba-Ba (which translates as "art daddy" or "art shit" depending on the tones of "ba-ba"), and his curatorial work.

1.View of "Jill Magid: A Reasonable Man in a Box," 2010.

"Jill Magid: A Reasonable Man in a Box," the Whitney Museum, New York

July 1 – September 12, 2010

When Jill Magid wrote "What is a reasonable man in a box?" on the Whitney's wall I suspect she already knew the answer. The text references the "Bybee Memo," a leaked 2004 memorandum from the US Justice Department prescribing legal means for the CIA to employ illegal torture techniques such as confinement with insects.

1.Nashashibi / Skaer, Our Magnolia, 2009.

Nashashibi/Skaer at Murray Guy,
New York

25 June – 6 August 2010

Respected artists in their own right, Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer have also led a fruitful collaboration since 2005, pairing their unique temperaments in taut, reflexive films and installations.

Johann König Photo: Ulrike Kuschel

Grilling the gallerist:
Johann König interviewed by
Jordan Wolfson

When Johann König opened his first gallery space, not only was he the youngest kid on the block, but he also faced another challenge: he was nearly blind. "How much I see is a myth!" he told me recently.

1.Mario Garcia Torres, Time to Piece, 2010.

Mario Garcia Torres'
"I Will Be with You Shortly" at Peep-Hole, Milan

2 June – 24 July 2010

Mario Garcia Torres is well acquainted with the past of Peep-Hole, one the newest non-profit spaces run by three curators in Milan. In fact, he not only alluded to it, but he also enhanced its weight. In a letter given to the visitor, the artist stated his wish to "create a certain atmosphere (…) an overall parenthesis, a space between time."

1.Fiona Banner, Harrier and Jaguar (detail), 2010.

Fiona Banner's "Harrier and Jaguar" at Tate Britain

28 June 2010 – 3 January 2011

Plucked from the sky, a Sea Harrier and a Sepecat Jaguar jet have fallen to earth in Tate Britain. It's the work of Fiona Banner, and in an average summer critics would be busy drawing tidy parallels between the work and the UK's ongoing military involvement in overseas conflicts.

1.Liang Shuo, Fit, 2010.

Liang Shuo’s "Fit" at C5 Gallery, Beijing

June 12 – July 25, 2010

Containing objects copiously collected over the past two years and assembled on-site over a month, "Fit" is a monument to the plastic, gaudy, and jerry-rigged aesthetic that permeates contemporary China.

1.View of "1848!!!," 2010.

Liam Gillick's "1848!!!" at Esther Schipper, Berlin

June 12 – Aug 31, 2010

With an exhaustive monographic exhibition currently on show in Bonn, a lengthy touring retrospective recently over, and last year's opinion-dividing outing in the Venice Biennale's German Pavilion, not to mention the reams of printed matter and symposia that make up the productive phenomenon that is Liam Gillick, what can a small-scale gallery show have to offer?

1.Rodney Graham, Paradoxical Western Scene, 2006.

Rodney Graham's "Painter, Poet, Lighthouse Keeper" at Lisson Gallery, London

June 23 – July 31, 2010

Since first stepping onto the other side of the lens in the mid-90s, Rodney Graham has fashioned himself as all color of amateur and outlaw in a wry game of wish fulfillment for an artist of inescapable renown.

1.Michel Auder, The Games: Olympic Variations, 1984.

Michel Auder’s "Keeping Busy: An Inaccurate Survey"

June 24 – Aug 13, 2010

Michel Auder's current New York exhibition could be called "epic," if his approach weren't so far removed from any claims to grandeur. There are samplings from four decades of film and video, shown as single- and multi-screen installations, accompanied by film stills, polaroids, postcards, and the occasional rooster lamp.

1. John Smith, Dirty Pictures (Hotel Diaries 7), 2007

John Smith's "Flag Mountain/Black Tower" at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

12 June – 24 July, 2010

The reason why things don’t remain the same is because they were never thus. Everything contains manifold dialectical possibilities. A man’s home might be his castle, yet no castle is a monolith. No hotel room is a monolith either.

Headless, illustration by Johan Hjerpe for Goldin+Senneby.

Goldin+Senneby at
Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

June 5 – July 25, 2010

On June 6, 2010, the world woke up to a perplexing $2.6 trillion conundrum. The New York Times headlines indicated a whodunit mystery, "Debtors' Prism: Who Has Europe's Loans?"

1.Ryan Gander, Loose Associations, 2002-2010

Art Parcours at
Art Basel 41

17 – 19 June, 2010

After seeing what felt like thousands of artworks in hundreds of booths at the fairs, the feeling of walking around Basel's old town in search of the nine individual art projects of Jens Hoffmann's Art Parcours was a welcome hiatus from fair fatigue.

Philippe Parreno, Air de Paris, Art Galleries

Art Basel 41

15-19 June 2010

Last weekend during the Berlin Biennale I found myself wedged up against a rock star. (Rock star? That's a far cry from what Michael Stipe means. His lyrics gave solace to a whole generation of purblind pubescents in the late 80s.) He said hello, shyly, and I asked him, bluntly, about an album cover clutched under his arm.

1.View of "Felix Gonzalez-Torres."

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
at Fondation Beyeler, Basel

22 May – 29 Aug, 2010

It was a profoundly disorienting encounter: in a room of Picasso paintings at the Fondation Beyeler, I suddenly came across a tall, muscled, black man in a pair of silver hot pants dancing silently and joyfully to music on his headphones.

1.Palazzo Citterio, Milan, Italy.

Paul McCarthy’s
"Pig Island" at
Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan

20 May – 4 July, 2010

Solitude, abandon, restlessness, vulnerability: feelings a visitor might not expect to experience at the Palazzo Citterio. The refined 18th century rococo façade is at home in the elegant Brera district of Milan, but despite its chic external architecture, this sober face hides the perfect setting for Paul McCarthy's delirious "Pig Island."

1.View of "Asdfjkl;" 2010.

Rachel Harrison's "Asdfjkl;" at
Regen Projects, LA

May 27 – July 10, 2010

Everything lilts and tilts in Rachel Harrison's upright totems. Boxy facets jut out at every angle and swollen protrusions bulge all over the rough, peaked, and slathered stucco surfaces. Her piecemeal monoliths totter drunkenly in a barely-balanced equilibrium of unstable, crudely Cubistic passages.

1.View of, "6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art," 2010.

6th Berlin Biennale, Part 2

11 June – 8 August 2010

Day two began at a nondescript warehouse at Mehringdamm 28 to see an installation of George Kuchar films (selected by film curator Marc Siegel) and a brick, (oddly) chapel-like construction housing new sculptural work by Cameron Jamie. Nestled between parking lots and car-repair shops in an industrial patch that has survived the gentrification of the now semi-posh (and ultra-boring) Bergmannkiez section of Kreuzberg, this venue reminded me of summer in Chelsea in the mid-90s, especially given the rapidly rising heat and humidity, which, as the day wore on, made art-viewing increasingly challenging in a city unprepared for such temperatures.

1.Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water, 2007

"A Vernacular of Violence" at
Invisible-Exports,
New York

May 14 – June 20, 2010

In an untitled text from 2005, the artist collective Claire Fontaine drew a distinction from the shopworn idea of distributed, democratic power, claiming, "Now power explicitly exhibits all the violence it needs to conserve itself" and, thus, implicitly excluding the participation of society's many constituents.

1.View of, "6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art," 2010.

6th Berlin Biennale, Part 1

11 June – 8 August 2010

Curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, the sixth edition of the Berlin Biennale seeks to examine the manner in which art negotiates "reality"—a loaded term, described rather abstractly in the curatorial statement—in a time of historical crisis and renegotiation that begins with the fall of communism and is marked, most recently, by September 11 and the collapse of financial capitalism.

1.Franklin Evans, timecompressionmachine, 2010.

"Greater New York 2010"

May 23 – October 18, 2010

Several installations from P.S.1's inaugural exhibition "Rooms" (1976) have left a lasting mark on the institution—literally so, as they're embedded into the building.

1.Michael Snow, La Revue, 1986-2006.

Sex and Sound
"Works by Michael Snow:
Piano Sculpture and Sex" at Klosterfelde

April 30 – June 4, 2010

Klosterfelde gallery's exhibition of Michael Snow, the poster child for experimental media, perfectly mirrors the maze of his artistic life. Almost an attempt at a comprehensive retrospective, the show spans through several decades of no less diverse production.

View of, "Trisha Donnelly," 2010, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.

Trisha Donnelly at
Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

May 8 – June 26, 2010

Is a lot of empty space and a couple big slabs of marble enough to unify an exhibition? Almost certainly yes, which is also the problem: it’s too easy to make a show look cohesive when there’s not much in it. For her fourth solo show at Casey Kaplan, Tricia Donnelly sparsely arranged a few stone sculptures to look like relics from the fourth (and relatively empty) dimension.

Stefan Constantinescu, The Golden Age for Children, 2008.

Truth is Stranger
On the Bucharest Biennale 4: Handlung. On Producing Possibilities

21 May – 25 July 2010

In Stefan Constantinescu’s The Golden Age for Children, the above excerpt appears in a lengthy letter from a Swedish friend of the artist who shares his concern with the legacy of Communism in Romania. The piece, a colorful pop-up book complete with pull tabs and 3D archival photos jumping out from every page, stands out because of its humor and craft and also as one of the works which best exemplifies the exhibit’s theme.