Larry Rivers. Maquette for Larry Rivers Exhibition at Dwan Gallery, 1961. Collection of Virginia Dwan, © Estate of Larry Rivers. Photo: Tricia Zigmund.

“Any ideas of art history or significance were forgotten,” wrote gallerist Virginia Dwan in 1990, remembering the first time she saw one of Yves Klein’s all-blue reliefs through the window of Galerie Rive Droite in Paris. Within a year, Klein would be living in Dwan’s Malibu beach house, making work to show in her Los Angeles gallery.

On March 14, 2017, five days before the opening of Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971 at Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), Dwan spoke about the excitement Klein brought her. He “has gotten a rather bad reputation of just taking nudes and scrubbing them around on canvas,” she said, but that interested her less than his wilder conceptual imaginings. “He wanted to build architecture from jets of air coming out of the ground … He was involved with the whole universe, actually,” the 85-year-old continued, “and very important to my thinking finally.” Her affinity for Klein’s ambitions is telling: Dwan cared far more about fostering adventurous urges, and engaging them, than her position in Important Art.

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Jill Magid. The Proposal (detail), 2016; uncut, 2.02 carat blue diamond with micro-laser inscription “I am wholeheartedly yours,” silver ring, ring box, documents. Setting design: Anndra Neen. Courtesy of the Artist; LABOR, Mexico City; RaebervonStenglin, Zurich, and Galerie Untilthen, Paris.

As the spectacle of the 2016 United States presidential elections played out over the summer, Mexico hosted a surreal visit by a well-known, polarizing New Yorker. Mirroring Trump in her own way, Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Jill Magid brandished symbols of wealth and messianic messaging, while conducting a master class in media manipulation. Much ink was spilt last year on her controversial mission to insert herself “into the life of a dead man” with her four-year project The Barragán Archives (2012–16). The work was generally celebrated by standard-bearer publications and has been widely circulated on social media. In Mexico, however, the reception to Magid’s work has been decidedly more ambivalent. And broader questions loom: How are journalists to report stories responsibly when truth seems to matter less than attention, and the very fact of reporting becomes, itself, a post-truth prop? With hollow justifications of “alternative facts” ringing in our ears daily, it feels more than slightly uncomfortable to lift another skillful prevaricator upon our shoulders.

The dead man in question was Pritzker Prize-winning Mexican architect Luis Barragán, whose ashes Magid negotiated to have transformed into a one-carat diamond. This gem was set in an engagement ring, which she offered to Dr. Federica Zanco, the director of the architect’s professional archive, in exchange for the documents’ repatriation to Mexico from Switzerland. Titled The Proposal (2016), Magid’s offering of the ring represents “the final climactic instalment” of The Barragán Archives, which sought to “understand what it meant for an artist’s legacy to be controlled by a corporation.”

Read the full review here.

Tanya Lukin Linklater. He Was a Poet and He Taught Us How to React and to Become This Poetry, 2016. Courtesy of BNLMTL. Photo: Guy l’Heureux.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s nauseating election victory, hard on the heels of this year’s earlier Brexit vote in the UK, it has become clear that the post-1989 era of neoliberal globalization is over. Given that contemporary art as we know it has been defined in relation to this political–economic configuration, can we say that “contemporaneity” is ending, too? If so, what might art look like after “contemporary art”? The 2016 Montreal Biennale, presented in the midst of these upheavals, is symptomatic of this uncertainty.

In the press preview for the biennial, curator Philippe Pirotte was at pains to distinguish his exhibition from other recent large-scale exhibitions that, in his opinion, made excessively sweeping pronouncements about the contemporary moment and the likely future. In particular, he criticized the recent Berlin Biennial (“The Present in Drag”) and the 2015 Venice Biennale (“All the World’s Futures”). However, his implicit, unmentioned target was perhaps the previous installment of the Montreal Biennial itself, which was titled “L’avenir (Looking Forward)” and concerned itself with the broad question of “what is to come.”

Read the full essay here.

Bruce Davidson. New York City, 1959. Brooklyn Gang. Courtesy: Magnum Photos.

No one likes being called an amateur, a dilettante, a dabbler.

“Unprofessional” is an easy insult.

The professional always makes the right moves, knows the right thing to say, the right name to check. Controlled and measured, the professional never fucks the wrong person or drinks too much at the party. They never weep at the opening, never lay in bed for days too depressed, sick, broken to move. They say about the professional, “so easy to work with” or “so exacting but brilliant.” The professional takes advantage from every encounter, employs every new acquaintance as a contact, always hits the deadline. When asked about their work, they know what to say, a few lines of explanation sprinkled with enough filigreed intrigue to allude to abysses of research, the mysteries of making. They answer emails in minutes. Their PowerPoints are super crisp. Look at their website, so clean, so modern, so very pro.

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Kathryn Andrews. Black Bars, 2016; installation view. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

My first trip to Los Angeles started ten days after an election that diminished our assurance in something like a common good. I booked the flight before that fatal turn, of course, expecting something cool, maybe correcting in the city’s artworld; imagining a community of shaggy game-changers who’d successfully mooted the binary between ambition and good sleep. I met, instead, a people bent, broken, groping for genuine, if inarticulate, exchange. Over five days of back-to-back gallery visits, openings, and meetings, I shared in pressed and fractured conversations about art and much else, that felt urgent and unlikely. I was nearly grateful for my timing.

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We want our artists to publicly bleed for us as quickly as we feel our wounds. An ever-renewing online media suggests immediate reflection (and when the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker can produce two of the most in-depth and affecting responses to Trump’s election inside a week, why expect anything less?). However, recent publishing standards haven’t overcome the time lag that consideration requires.

It’s important to remember that it takes a minute for good art to show up. That the strange, static awareness we feel after an upset—the something-like-silence where we’re observing the noise and fog of our own breath and trying to read into it a message—is not rudderlessness or detachment, but the substance of responding.

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Left, Arabelle Sicardi and Tayler Smith’s original photograph, “Hari Nef,” 2014. Right, Zak Arctander’s appropriation, “Cheeks,” 2015.

Julia Kristeva branded the concept of “intertextuality” nearly four decades ago, but technology and philosophy are poorly matched bedfellows. It’s time to spell out the basics of appropriation in visual culture for the smartphone generation.

I’m sorry that the above sounds paternalistic on my part. Actually, I’m not. An entire generation of artists raised on the internet shouldn’t need instruction on how image transference and re-purposing works: You created this free-for-all; please stop complaining when you occasionally fall down and get a boo-boo in your own bouncy castle.

Of course, I am referring to two recent art “outrages,” one involving Richard Prince and his re-purposing of images created by, among others, the for-profit pin-up site Suicide Girls; and another upset attributed to an alleged follower of Prince, who re-purposed the work of two emerging queer feminist photographers.

I rather doubt the Prince works would have received a tenth of the press they did (and that I am giving them now) had it not been for the (delayed) reaction by some of the artists and models featured in the show. Prince skimmed through his Instagram feed, picked some photos of women he found attractive (a sadly predictable lot of rather traditional sexpot images), and blew up the scans. He first showed these blow-ups at Gagosian Gallery over a year ago, and nobody cared. Then the works started selling at the Frieze Art Fair New York for around 100K, and suddenly everybody cared. A vacuous collection of casual gestures by an over-rewarded artist, a series of works that ought to have been yawned into oblivion, became a cause celebre.

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