I suffered through all the poorly written criticism, but they were wrong: Kara Walker's installation at the now vanished Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn was pitch-perfect. A meditation on history, a detourment of industry and a critique of the naturalized imaging of race- Walker's piece worked. How do I know? I saw it with a precocious 10 year old and had days of discussion.
When I wasn't wincing and averting my eyes from screeds re: Walker, I was ranting rejoinders to poorly reasoned, historically unschooled criticisms of Jeff Koons. The Whitney show was a masterpiece of commodity critique. Installed perfectly, connecting all the dots and making clear to anyone who actually took the time to look at it that Koons has been engaged in one perfectly coherent critical practice since The New Capital exhibition.
Robert Longo's double show at Metro Pictures and Petzel brought his stunning Capitol drawing to New York, but those New York School drawings cranked up the discourse even higher. Like Borges's cartographers, Longo overlaid 1:1 ghosts of American-dreams-past on our stumbling present. Drawn so well no one even knew what to do with them. I say, "look hard."
I didn't really enjoy looking at Richard Prince's Instagram canvases-- but I don't think that was the point. Again, the blogosphere ignited with assertions this-way or that. Don't kill the messenger, folks. Prince didn't steal the pics, he merely pointed out that we have all freely gifted our images to data-mining corporations. We're not customers-- were users. Baudrillard said that it would be seduction not coercion that would control us and, as one of my students deftly observed, "the outrage is correct, though directed at the wrong target." #hashtag that.
Adjoining many of those conceptual threads was Oliver Wasow’s show of new photographs at Theodore Art in Bushwick. Wasow is particularly good at lodging big ideas in simple formats- from his well-known fake-UFO pics, to his massive Artist Unknown project of scavenged online pics (opening in February at The Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley) to this quiet and demure group of portraits that set up all sorts of ideas of history, representation and truth. A great, quiet, philosophical show.
Goya at the MFA Boston. What more can one say really? Awing, humbling, battering, unforgettable.
Two concurrent shows of Ellsworth Kelly-- Monet/ Kelly at the Clark paired a treasure-trove of Monets with a series of Kelly drawings observed from the same locations as well as Kelly's first monochrome where he clearly takes Monet and "makes it new." Meanwhile, at Mount Holyoke College Museum, Kelly prints from '64-65 were coupled with a cache of stunning, spare Matisse drawings.
I Was a Double at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College lodged in my memory-- especially Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's hypnotic pool of chiming ceramic bowls and Chris Martin's ad-hoc chairs and benches ( which speak somehow to my interest in Utopian strivings).
Susan Hartung at the Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley- as always, I admit my bias here, but this retrospective of the recently-deceased Hartung was beautiful and traced an inspiring line of the ever-searching life of an artist. I'd be pleased if one day...
Also a shout out to my old friend Michael Oatman (the art world is all about nepotism, right?) for an impressive show with Colin Boyd at the Arts Center in Troy. Seemingly indefatigable, Oatman is never one to just hang some works and here wove a complex categorical system through what became a cabinet-of-curiosity-like-
I was pleased to be included in The Sun That Never Sets: Spectacle and Normalcy in Time-- a smart show curated by Rachel Rampleman and Vanessa Albury in the Spring Break Art Fair with such stand-out comrades at the McCoys, Juliet Jacobsen and, of course, Tara Fracalossi.
And a late addition-- I almost forgot to mention the haunting Jasper Johns show at MoMA. His new cycle of paintings and prints showed an artist in his prime (again) working through material and turning it over and over. (And just for the record- I haven't seen the Gober or Matisse show yet).
Other random bests of 2014... Playing catch up with the Cascadian Group, Laruelle, Brassier and their circle (Thanks Kevin McCoy).
And finally-- the best of getting (a little) older is having and actually noting the friends and acquaintances of old and new vintage- "the historical weight"(as one old friend recently called it ) and the blush of the new. I am fortunate.
Happy 2015... Make good stuff.
Thomas Lail