The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Fischl Paints Art Fairs With Oils and Acid" @wsj by  ANNA RUSSELL

'Art Fair: Booth #1 Oldenberg's Sneakers' by Eric Fischl Eric Fischl/Mary Boone Gallery, New York

For some, contemporary art fairs are places to see and be seen. For New York-based artist Eric Fischl, they're more like a series of bad dates. "It's like speed dating," he said. "People try to make instantaneous assessments."

Mr. Fischl, whose large-scale figurative paintings have long been fixtures on the contemporary art-fair circuit, has spent his four-decade career in the art world hiding out from such places. Nevertheless, in 2012, he picked up his camera and headed to Art Basel Miami Beach.

The resulting series, "Art Fair Paintings," will be on view at London's Victoria Miro Gallery from Oct. 14. The pictures offer sharp, often humorous takes on the contemporary art world. At age 66, Mr. Fischl casts a wry eye over the oddballs and sophisticates that wander the galleries in his dozen or so new works. "I finally decided to face the reality, which is that this is my milieu," he said.

Known for erotically charged suburban scenes, Mr. Fischl gained recognition in the 1980s with works like "Bad Boy," which depicts a young boy standing before a naked woman (his memoir from last year carries the same name). More recently, he has painted portraits of friends E.L. Doctorow and Steve Martin, sprawling beach scenes and large group portraits.

At auction, his works have sold in the high six figures or above (he set a personal record with his painting "Daddy's Girl," which sold for $1.9 million at Christie's in 2006). But at his home in bucolic Sag Harbor, where he lives full-time with his wife, the painter April Gornik, Mr. Fischl said he still feels like an outsider in the art world. He dislikes the crowds and the lack of space for quiet contemplation at art fairs. "It's so anti-art, it's a nightmare," he said.

"We don't have a lot of great places to go look at art," he said. "It seems like everything has to be shared by a crunch of people and a pressure to hurry up and get it."

Mr. Fischl went to Art Basel Miami Beach in search of "characters," he said. At the fair, he wandered the booths snapping pictures of interesting people. He photographed a woman in a flowing red dress and a man in dark sunglasses with his arms folded. He later visited Art Southampton, Frieze Art Fair New York, and gallery openings for additional material. At his studio, he used Photoshop to cut and paste the images into collages he found dynamic or compelling. These compositions became the basis for the large-scale canvases.

Eric Fischl, 'Art Fair: Booth #4 The Price' Eric Fischl/Mary Boone Gallery, New York

In one, "Art Fair: Booth #4 The Price," fashionably clad men and women mill about chatting or tapping their phones distractedly. Behind them, an enormous portrait of a naked woman by Joan Semmel goes nearly unnoticed. "They're texting, they're photographing, somehow they're mediating their moment," said Mr. Fischl. The title is a play on the Ken Price sculpture in the center of the group.

Mr. Fischl finds humor in the works but also said they're about "artists' intentions, artists' desires to connect, and how short that will fall." Art fairs create "a tension that I like as a dramatic moment," he said, "everybody at cross-purposes."

Painting the fairs has also been a technical challenge for the artist. The white-cube architecture of the booths presents new spatial problems, and trying to recreate the artwork on display—like the dusty orange and blue lips of an Andy Warhol "Mao" portrait in "Art Fair: Booth #16 Sexual Politics"—has expanded his color range beyond his usual palette.

One woman he followed through several display areas at Art Basel Miami was photography student Mariel Lebrija. On the day he photographed her, she wore a flat-brimmed hat and funky shoes and stopped to look closely at many of the works. Ms. Lebrija, 24, was surprised to see herself in one of Mr. Fischl's paintings over a year later at Frieze New York this past May, where a few of the paintings from the series were exhibited. "The first thing I recognized was my clothes," she said. "It was really funny."

The artist's longtime dealer Mary Boone, of New York's Mary Boone Gallery, said she sees echoes of his earlier work in the social commentary the new series offers—though this time it's directed at the art world. "He's pointing out there's a certain vanity to it," she said.

The timing of Mr. Fischl's show offers an added wink: it opens just before Frieze London. "People can go to the art fair and then they can come to my show and see what they look like," he said.

George Lindemann Journal "Brazilian Artist Beatriz Milhazes Takes Center Stage in the U.S." @wsj Kelly Crow

The Works of Beatriz Milhazes

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Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes's explosive botanical scenes will be on display in her first solo museum show in the U.S. at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Above,'São Cosme e Damião,' (Saints Cosmas and Damian), 2014 Beatriz Milhazes/James Cohan Gallery, NY

Beatriz Milhazes's explosive botanical scenes have been coveted for years by collectors throughout South America and Europe, but on Sept. 19, the Brazilian painter will open her first solo museum show in the U.S. at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

The exhibit amounts to an official debut for the museum, the former Miami Art Museum that gained a new name when it moved into a sleek Herzog & de Meuron-designed building last year. PAMM has since held several group shows, but Ms. Milhazes's "Botânical Garden" represents its first retrospective, organized by its chief curator Tobias Ostrander.

Mr. Ostrander said he chose Ms. Milhazes because her Spirograph-like paintings of overlapping blossoms, stripes and unfurling leaves will likely resonate with audiences in Miami's climate—particularly the city's growing Brazilian diaspora.

The 50-work show also comes at a time when the artist appears to be moving away from her signature bouquets toward compositions that feature more geometric shapes and straight lines. "Beatriz's art was always sensual and dizzying, just sensory overload," Mr. Ostrander said. "She's moving more and more toward purely geometric forms."

From a market standpoint, her decision could be a risk. Over the past decade, major collectors have gravitated toward her more-is-more arrangements—in part because the cheeriness of her canvases seemed to match Brazil's economic rise. In May 2008, Buenos Aires collector Eduardo Costantini paid Sotheby's $1 million for her rainbow-hued "Magic" from 2001, tripling its high estimate. That painting will be part of the PAMM show, along with flowery pieces lent by heavyweights like German publisher Benedikt Taschen, Austrian philanthropist Francesca von Habsburg and Washington lobbyist Tony Podesta.

Ms. Milhazes, speaking from her studio in Rio de Janeiro, said her shift toward abstraction is actually her artistic equivalent of coming home—because the story of 20th century Brazil hinges heavily on geometry. Ms. Milhazes, who grew up in Brazil during an era of dictatorship, said her peers rarely got to see much contemporary art. But her mother was an art-history professor, so she learned about Brazil's latest art trends. Her family revered the Brazilian modernist painters of the 1930s, but the local art scene in the 1960s was all about the Neo-Concrete, a movement that prized art made using principles of geometry or movement rather than covering canvases in brushstrokes. Neo-Concrete stars included Lygia Clark, who cut shards of aluminumn to make origami-like sculptures, and Lygia Pape, who strung rows of gold thread to create obstacle course-like installations.

She knew about these Neo-Concrete artists, but she yearned to paint. Her first artist crush was Henri Matisse. In college, she studied journalism by day but took art classes at night and reveled in making collages from bits of fabric and colored paper. She attended Rio's carnivals and parades and took inspiration from the effusion of ruffles and undulation. With her parents' blessing, she started painting flowers with lacy curlicues in hot, Fauvist hues—but "I always felt like an outsider," she said.

Her painting methods also stood apart. In 1989, she began experimenting with how to create a painting that could ape the stacked look of a paper collage, with some elements hidden behind others. Her eureka moment hit when she used acrylic to paint on a clear sheet of plastic, then used glue and pressure to transfer her designs onto canvas. Sometimes the design flaked, but she liked the decayed look such "mistakes" produced, she said. Nobody in Brazil was applying this decal-like process to fine art, and it became her breakthrough.

She has built a glossary of motifs to lay and overlay, and the PAMM exhibition charts their evolution. In the early 1990s, her works contain tribal references and Baroque designs like ruffles, beads, and flowers; later, she adds Pop elements like hearts, peace signs and fruity headdress shapes that nod to her compatriot Carmen Miranda. The market tends to favor the "exploding circles" series that followed in the next decade, where works like "The Son of London" revolve around blossoming dahlia-like forms.

Two of the three new works in the Miami exhibit hint at where Ms. Milhazes could be headed, led by "Flowers and Trees." Gone are the frills and fruit, this canvas evokes a forest comprised almost entirely of circles. Ms. Milhazes, a former math teacher, said "there's always been structure" to her paintings; her new works simply reveal more of the scaffolding.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Stuff of Life, Urgently Altered" @nytimes by HOLLAND COTTER

Sculpting With an Eye to Color

David Hammons’s “African American Flag” — with its Pan-African red and black stripes and green field of black stars — floats high over the sidewalk outside the Studio Museum in Harlem. Originally created nearly a quarter-century ago, it has become an identifying emblem for a museum dedicated to nurturing the careers of artists of African descent.

In 1980, Mr. Hammons himself was the beneficiary of that nurturing. A Los Angeles transplant still little known in New York, he was chosen that year to participate in the museum’s annual artists-in-residence program, which provides on-the-premises studio space, a stipend and a culminating exhibition. Today, he’s a star, the program continues, and work by its latest graduates is on view in a show called “Material Histories: Artists in Residence 2013-14.”

All three of its artists are, in more ways than one, Mr. Hammons’s heirs. Like him, they take race as a subject, one as critical as ever, as the news keeps reminding us. And they address that complex theme in a variety of subtly polemical visual languages with sources in popular culture.

Language itself, viewed as intrinsically racialized, is Bethany Collins’sprimary material. It’s the very substance of the inconspicuous centerpiece of her work done over the past year. Called “Colorblind Dictionary,” it’s simply a found and well-thumbed 1965 edition of a Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language in which the artist, who identifies herself as biracial, has carefully erased, or scratched out, all mentions of the words “black,” “white” and “brown.” As you flip through the book, paper shavings fall from the pages like dust.

She applies a comparable editing process to dozens of framed tear sheets from a 1987 issue of The Southern Review, a venerable literary magazine published by Louisiana State University. The contents of the journal itself are neither programmatically about the American South nor about race, but Ms. Collins, born in Montgomery, Ala., in 1984, turns its pages into a metaphorical play of black and white by inking out sections of printed text and isolating references to the writers Elizabeth Alexander, Derek Walcott and Carl van Vechten.

Finally, she cuts language loose from obvious meaning in two abstract paintings. Both, despite strongly worded references to race in their titles, are ethereal looking, with clusters of alphabetical characters written in light-blue pencil on a dark ground, like smudges left on a blackboard, or barely legible nebulae seen in a night sky.

The basic language in Kevin Beasley’s sculpture is body language, or the compressed traces of it. Several pieces in the show are made in part from clothing worn by the artist or someone he knows. An urn-shape sculpture from 2013 incorporates a floral-patterned nightgown of a kind favored by his grandmother. A 2014 wall hanging consists of a shag rug encrusted with studio debris, sealed in clear resin and festooned with soft-sculpture globes made from bunched-up underwear.The work looks at once abject and extraterrestrial, like mysterious, vacuum-packed matter from some other universe. It also has connections, direct or otherwise, to art history, specifically to a style of dense, street-derived assemblage made by John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Dale Brockman Davis and other members of a group of black artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s, of which Mr. Hammons was an integral member.

As was the case with some of those artists, Mr. Beasley’s output often has an aural dimension in the form of live or taped music. In 2012, he filled the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium with an earsplitting, bone-rattling multitrack soundscape composed from the layered voices of dead rappers like Eazy-E, Guru and Biggie Smalls. Sound doesn’t figure in the Studio Museum work, at least that I could detect, but layering does. So does a sense of vitality generated by objects that look both ruined and precious, pulled raw from the gutter but tenderly detailed, as if they’d been touched a lot, which they have.

Abigail DeVille’s big, busy, conglomerate sculptures speak street talk. Almost everything that went into their making — shopping carts, cinder blocks, plastic bags, clothes mannequins — was harvested from the neighborhood surrounding the museum. She combines the material in very intricate ways, but still leaves the components warm with their individual histories. (An installation she made for the group show “Fore” at the museum in 2012 included cigarette butts from her grandmother’s home in the Bronx.)

Now in her early 30s, Ms. DeVille has been exhibiting in the city for nearly a decade and developing increasingly refined and cogent forms of sculpture and installation. Her work at the Studio Museum, some of her best so far, leans in a distinctly sculptural direction, with “ADDC Obelisk” being the show’s tour de force. It is a 15-foot-long skeletal version of the Washington Monument, tilted on its side, propped up by box springs, its innards exposed, revealing tangles of rope and wiring, chicken-wire walls and mannequin limbs in illogical combinations.

As with everything Ms. DeVille does, the piece is expansively theatrical. (She has done stage design, most recently for the Peter Sellars production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.) But it’s deliberately shaped and self-contained enough to make a statement, which I take to be a political one: about the attention deficit of an American government that allows monumental degrees of racism to fester under its very eyes.

The exhibition, organized by Lauren Haynes, an assistant curator at the Studio Museum, also has the closest thing to painting I’ve yet seen from Ms. DeVille, an abstract collage assembled on pieces of Sheetrock attached to a gallery wall. The main material is paper, plain but imprinted with rubbings she made of the surface of local streets. With areas of drilled perforations and the addition of a brightly colored but paint-flaking found door, the result looks like a giant, distressed Anne Ryan collage, an aria to art history and to the story of everyday urban life. Its title is “Harlem Flag.” A salute to Mr. Hammons? My guess is yes.

George Lindemann Journal "A View of the Heavens Needs Some Retouching" @nytimes by WILLIAM GRIMES

“We are going to get it back as close as we can to the original state, but we want it to be easier to maintain and use less power,” Mr. Turrell said in a recent interview.

What to do, when to do it and how to pay for it have been the subject of intermittent discussions, interrupted by the demands of Mr. Turrell’s booming career. When Alanna Heiss, the founder of PS1 and its director until her retirement in 2008, commissioned the work back in the late 1970s, Mr. Turrell was known primarily on the West Coast and in Europe.

In the last decades, his increasingly bold experiments using light to shape space have captured the imagination of an ever-widening audience. Last year, his work was celebrated in three retrospectives, at the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Meanwhile, at PS1, “Meeting” languished. The work, in a former classroom on the museum’s third floor, is a chaste, minimal environment, a conscious allusion to the Quaker meeting houses that Mr. Turrell visited as a child. The central feature of the work is a rectangular cutout in the ceiling, framing the waning light and weather. (The room opens at 3 p.m.) Concealed tungsten light tubes emit a carefully modulated orange glow, intense around the edges of the opening, paler on the walls. Wooden benches with inclined backs line the walls in this environment mixing daylight and artificial light.

On his website, Mr. Turrell leads with an explanatory remark about his work. “I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it,” the comment runs. “My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.”

When Mr. Turrell was in New York, supervising the Guggenheim retrospective, he paid a visit to “Meeting” and proposed a restoration and an upgrade. The drywall around the opening in the ceiling needed a touch-up. The walls, because of multiple repaintings, needed to be taken back to their original state. In the late 1990s, a second layer of flooring and carpeting were added to the room.

“We need to adjust the height of the benches, or lower the floor, to restore the original distance,” said Peter Eleey, PS1’s curator and associate director of exhibitions and programs. “Now, your legs are a little higher, and it alters the sitting posture slightly, which changes your angle of vision.”

The movable steel cover for the ceiling has been a vexing problem for decades. Early on, it was hand-cranked by museum assistants, who would race to the roof when rain began to fall. (At one point, a wall switch was installed, giving collectors and curators who visited the work in its early stages the impression that the roof cover worked automatically. It was purely for show.) A mechanism with a moisture sensor, which was tried for a while, could not distinguish between high humidity and actual rainfall. Mr. Turrell has proposed a more advanced device, similar to the ones on new cars, that reacts only to water droplets.

Perhaps the most critical change involves lighting. In other projects, Mr. Turrell has abandoned incandescent lights and achieved the effects he wants using LED lights, something he has proposed for “Meeting.” “Going to LED will make it easier to repair and maintain, while using less energy,” he said.

The scope of the work and the financing are still being discussed, with Mr. Turrell radiating can-do optimism, and the museum hedging its bets. Mr. Turrell said that the actual work could be done in well under a year, once city permits are obtained. Although a firm to carry out the restoration has not been named, Janet Cross, of Cross Architecture, would seem to be the obvious candidate. Ms. Cross has worked with Mr. Turrell since the late 1980s on many projects, notably his magnum opus, the transformation ofRoden Crater, an extinct volcano cinder cone near Flagstaff, Ariz., into an artwork exploring Mr. Turrell’s ideas about light and space. She also did the renovation on his garden-level floor-through apartment on Gramercy Park West, now on the market for $2.85 million.

“One question is, what’s the difference between conservation and renovation,” Mr. Eleey said. “In each case, as James proposed things, we had to ask ourselves, would this change the nature of the work, as opposed to restoring it?”

The costs remain unknown, as do the means of covering them. Mr. Turrell has suggested that the owner of the work, Mark Booth, might step in and play a major role, and perhaps donate the work to MoMA, to boot. Mr. Booth, who took MTV to Europe, helped Rupert Murdoch get his British cable network off the ground, and later served as the chief executive officer of the jet-rental company NetJets Europe, is an avid collector. Recently, with his wife, Lauren, Mr. Booth donated “Gard Blue,” Mr. Turrell’s innovative 1968 light projection, to the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Mr. Booth’s alma mater. Mr. Eleey described the proposed participation of Mr. Booth as “a nice idea.” Nothing, he said, has been decided. Mr. Booth did not return calls seeking comment.

Ken Johnson, writing in The New York Times in 2011, described a late-afternoon visit to the room, when the skylight framed a drifting puffy cloud and a bird in flight. Staring into the center of the frame, he wrote, “an aura of intense orange appeared around the edges of the blue rectangle. A lighter shade of orange light coated the walls of the chamber, creating a gorgeous contrast between the warm glow of the inside and the royal blue above, wherein a single bright star twinkled.”

Mr. Turrell, recalling the long and arduous gestation of “Meeting,” said, “This was a piece I was pleased to make in those days, and PS1 was a place where you could do things like that.” He received a small amount of grant money to make it, but reached into his pocket to bring it to completion.

“It was probably the best investment I ever made,” he said. “A lot of people wanted to do things with me after seeing it.”

When the state appointed him president in June and dispatched him on this emergency mission, French headlines hailed Mr. Le Bon in the name of that fictional masked outlaw who battled tyrannical officials. And riffing on an English translation of his last name and his reputation for diplomacy, curators in the international art world called him Larry the Good.

His task: reopen the museum’s regal 17th-century mansion after five years of construction and renovation, with several missed start dates and an employee revolt that led to the firing in May of the previous president on the grounds of autocratic management.

“I don’t think I’m Zorro,” said Mr. Le Bon, 45, who presided over the opening of the Centre Pompidou Metz, that museum’s branch in northeast France, in 2010 and is a specialist in the art of 16th- and 17th-century garden design. “I don’t believe we are at war. There is no conflict. My method is very simple: to assess the situation, to read what has been produced and to listen.”

The Picasso Museum, in the Hôtel Salé, has had its public space more than double to house the largest collection of Picasso paintings in the world and is now scheduled to open on Oct. 25, which would have been Picasso’s 133rd birthday.

On Sept. 20 and 21, visitors will get a free preliminary peek at the empty mansion and its grand staircase, extravagant Corinthian pilasters and cupids before some 500 paintings are hung, including some from Picasso’s personal collection. In the meantime, Mr. Le Bon is waging a charm offensive, including reaching a preliminary accord with the ousted president, Anne Baldassari, a Picasso scholar who had invested much of her career in the museum.

This week, the ministry of culture and Mr. Le Bon were wrapping up an agreement to bring her back as a curator for the opening exhibition that she had already planned. (She was claiming a form of copyright on the arrangement of the paintings.) Her lawyer, Henri Leclerc — who made the novel claim — said he would not comment.

Mr. Le Bon has also reached to the broader circle of people affected by the expansion and has sought to mend frayed relationships, including some with Picasso’s descendants.

This state-run museum, started in 1985, owes its existence to the Picasso family, which donated a trove of more than 5,000 artworks after the artist’s death in 1973 under a law permitting heirs to contribute art in lieu of tax payments.

When the management shake-up happened, Claude Picasso, the artist’s son and a member of the museum board, erupted in fury, scorning any replacement as an impostor. However, since Mr. Le Bon’s appointment, Mr. Picasso has muted his criticism and declined to comment about the opening.

Mr. Le Bon met with him and also visited Maya Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s daughter by his mistress — and frequent model — Marie-Thérèse Walter. Soon after that encounter, she offered a public demonstration of her support for the new leadership with a gift of Picasso sketches and a partial drawing of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire that matches the other half, which is owned by the museum.

The choice was calculated to deliver a message of harmony, according to her son, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, a filmmaker in Paris who produced a documentary, which will air on local television, about the family and the museum. “It symbolizes reunification,” he said. “We walk in the same direction. My mother was sad to see that her father’s work had become a hostage in this story. She felt that people at the museum were like survivors on a raft, and they didn’t know whether we were against them.”

In addition to wooing the family, Mr. Le Bon hosted a flurry of personal and group meetings. The strategy was meant to turn the page on what the French press at one point called a psychodrama that figured in the departure of the most recent culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti. She was criticized for being slow to handle the museum affair, while costs soared to 52 million euros (about $68.3 million), and a string of employees left.

Mr. Le Bon met with the employees, the local union, gallery owners and neighbors miffed by the endless construction. There is now discussion underway about changing the metal pergola facing a garden and public space that provoked neighborhood criticism.

François Margolin, a documentary filmmaker and a neighbor who, together with a local preservation group, lodged complaints about the museum’s construction permits, said he met with Mr. Le Bon and came away impressed with his collegial style, an impression shared by the union.

“He is not egotistical,” Mr. Margolin said. “He has real experience opening museums. He is more open and has a method of working with other people, listening to the opinions of others. He is really professional.”

Beyond the neighborhood, Mr. Le Bon has also initiated contact with major French museums that had had frosty relations with his predecessor after she spurned some requests for Picasso art loans. In October, he is lending three Picasso works to the Musée d’Orsay for its exhibition on the theme of the Marquis de Sade, and he is planning more loans to museums in France and New York. Loan fees for some of the works, which had traveled for years on the international exhibition circuit, had helped finance the restoration. Mr. Le Bon said he expects to produce more revenue through touring exhibitions, in part because the museum is expected to finance more than 60 percent of its annual budget, which has not been set yet by the government.

“It’s a public collection and does not belong to me,” Mr. Le Bon said on Tuesday in an interview at his office. “I am delighted that we have such a huge stock in reserve. And I also am glad that there are people that want to use it for great projects. That’s part of our métier: collection, exhibition.”

On Tuesday, the scaffolding that laced the mansion was gone. Police stood guard, barricading the passageway except for trucks transporting the first Picasso artworks to arrive after a long absence. President François Hollande is expected to inaugurate the museum as part of a round of high-profile openings. (The Louis Vuitton contemporary art center, designed by Frank Gehry, opens the same week.)

“It’s like preparing a play, or a film, or a musical spectacular,” Mr. Le Bon said, recalling how he was moved to tears when the first person walked in the door of the Centre Pompidou Metz “An opening is magic.”

In this spectacle, the stars making a reappearance include Picasso’s gigantic work “The Pipes of Pan” (1923), from his neo-Classical period, along with the works from his personal collection, by Renoir and Gauguin, a gaunt self-portrait from Picasso’s Blue Period, in 1901, and his grand collage “Femmes à Leur Toilette” (1938). The works by other artists will be housed in a luminous room with exposed beams natural light and a sweeping view of Paris.

Out of habit, some neighbors in this medieval neighborhood are bracing for further delays, but Mr. Le Bon insists that the grand double doors will open on time and that the museum has restored its serenity.

“It’s certain that it will open,” he said. “That’s for sure. This is my job and my passion.”

George Lindemann Journal - "A Daring Duo Portrays a Divided Britain" @wsj by Mary M. Lane

'Astro Star,' by Gilbert & George, is at the White Cube gallery in London. © Gilbert & George/White Cube

Strolling through East London three years ago, Gilbert & George stumbled on empty nitrous-oxide gas containers that young partygoers had used for a euphoric high. To the artistic duo, the cans looked like miniature bombs. At the same time, they were noticing on the same streets a growing group of English-born Muslim women clad in all-covering black shrouds.

Gilbert & George decided to explore this contrast between rebellion and conservatism, and the result is "Scapegoating," 123 photographic collages featuring gas canisters, posters promoting strict Islamic law and veiled Muslim women.

"Scapegoating" is "about capturing a schizophrenic London," said Gilbert Proesch, 70, who became romantically and professionally linked with George Passmore, 72, after they met at St. Martin's School of Art in 1967. They have put up half of the collages at London's White Cube gallery until Sept. 28, while a second installment opens on Sunday at Paris's Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

Gilbert & George are now almost household names in Europe. Their local pub bears a large mural honoring them. They have won the prestigious Turner Prize, represented the U.K. in the 2005 Venice Biennale, and their major 2007 Tate Museum retrospective ended at the Brooklyn Museum.

As an example of the duo's view of a divided Britain, Mr. Proesch pointed to "Astro Star," an 8-by-14-foot symmetrical work showing two veiled women circumventing a headless figure in skin-tight jeans. The artists' ghostlike faces and a local café menu, advertising such British fares as steak pie, surround them.

The artists have divided each picture into panels—a look Westerners might associate with stained glass windows, they say. The duo used only five colors: onyx, white, tan, yellow and red.

In "Puttees," a shrouded woman carries two shopping bags down a blood-red street. Beside her, Gilbert & George, distorted to resemble skeletons, raise their palms in supplicating pleas.

Artists Gilbert and George outside their studio in East London last month Jason Alden for The Wall Street Journal

Both artists say the series expands on earlier work that cast a critical look at ideologies like white supremacy and Christian fundamentalism. "What's wrong with a godless religion built around having impeccable manners?" said Mr. Proesch, straightening his tie portraying frogs leaping atop green silk.

For 45 years, Gilbert & George have worn self-designed tweed suits. What began as a marketing aid is now part of an ethos that sees maintaining fastidious standards as a way to show spiritual respect for fellow humans, they say.

Gilbert & George express sympathy for the 2010 French ban on the burqa, the all-body shroud worn by certain Muslim women—a decision that caused much debate in Britain. "Is [the burqa] a wonderful expression of the tolerant society we live in, or are there dangers to it?" asked Mr. Passmore.

"We haven't shown something as political as these works before," says Thaddaeus Ropac, 54, who opened his gallery in Paris in 1990. "The French will embrace it. I just wonder how the members of these [Islam-practicing] ethnic groups will feel." So far he has heard of no protests.

Gilbert & George's White Cube and Ropac works are priced between $91,000 and $829,000.

The artists have always courted criticism with once-controversial themes such as homoeroticism or bodily fluids. The two touched on other topics as they gained fame, but English critics still referred to them as "fruits in suits" when they addressed nonsexual topics, they say. "It didn't matter what the subject was, it was 'gay art' and that wasn't acceptable," said Mr. Proesch.

In time the sexualized themes that brought them publicity have become accepted and even copied. That, the artists say, galvanized them to explore new subject matter: fundamentalism and what Mr. Passmore calls youthful "hooliganism."

The artists remain a tough sell in the U.S., say curators and dealers. They enjoy a cult following among some private American collectors—nearly all of whom own several works and have adequate space for their large-scale pictures, says their New York dealer, Rachel Lehmann. She recently closed a show in Manhattan of historical Gilbert & George videos. They weren't for sale; the exhibition was part of her long-term plan to glean more academic attention for the duo.

Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman, known among curators for his niche artistic predilections, organized the only U.S. touring show of Gilbert & George's work in 1984 and 1985, as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "All that male frontal nudity... We had to do a lot of convincing to get museums to take the show" and secure the necessary corporate sponsors, he said.

For Gilbert & George's American devotees, salvation may lie in the South. Curator Bonnie Clearwater is planning a late-2015 Fort Lauderdale, Fla., exhibition to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, a mecca for collectors coveting controversy. Ms. Clearwater employed the same strategy last year to promote British artist Tracey Emin. The show was a hit, and Ms. Emin's prices have been climbing since.

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Hitchhiker on an Electronic Road" @nytimes HOLLAND COTTER

   

 

If you want someone to praise or blame for the relentlessly wired, chatty, information-soaked 21st-century world we inhabit, the artist Nam June Paik is an apt candidate. Credited as the founder of video art in the 1960s, he turned television into an interactive vehicle for radical theater. He invented the phrase “electronic superhighway” and imagined beta versions of smartphones, Google Glass, distant learning, YouTube, Instagram and the Internet itself.

The effort to situate this artist, who died in 2006, as a pioneer of the digital present seems to be the main impetus behind “Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot” at Asia Society, a large and good-looking show — designed by Clayton Vogel, it fills all of the museum’s galleries — that otherwise doesn’t seem to have any particular reason for being.

A lot of what’s in it is textbook stuff, and a few less familiar late pieces — paint-slathered portable televisions — aren’t so hot. The catalog offers no new research. Its most substantial entries are a reprinted 2007 essay by the art historian David Joselit and reproductions of Paik manuscripts from an archive donated by his nephew Ken Hakuta to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, which did its own full-scale Paik survey in 2012-13.

Still, the show is worthy of notice, because Paik is, as is quite evident here, a prescient thinker as well as a born entertainer. And its very presence at Asia Society raises at least one relatively unexplored question: How American was he? Although he based the better part of his long career in New York, he always seemed to be geographically unfixed and culturally unaligned, an existential floater who made some of his most interesting art from pixels and sound waves bounced off satellites circling in space.

Paik (pronounced pake) was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1932, the youngest son of a wealthy businessman. In advance of the Korean War, the family moved to Hong Kong in 1949 and Japan a year later. At Tokyo University, Paik studied art and music, writing an undergraduate thesis on Arnold Schoenberg. In 1956, he pursued further musical studies in Germany where, in a kind of conversion experience, he met the visiting composer John Cage.

Cage, with his punctilious zaniness and absorption in Zen Buddhism, was a crucial, liberating influence. Paik, also a Buddhist, ran with the influence and elaborated on it. In addition to composing music, he began experimenting with sculpture, performance and what were at the time still front-edge electronic media: television, personal videotape recorders, primitive home computers. And he combined them with a sensationalist flair pitched to a popular audience.

Returning to Japan in 1964, he funneled this geekish theatricality into creating his first life-size, remote-controlled robot in collaboration with an electronics engineer, Shuya Abe. Named Robot K-456 — the reference is to a Mozart piano concerto — and now on loan from a German collection, it’s the first thing we see in the show, and it’s quite a sight. A futuristic antique, its mechanics now look fragile in the extreme, but its oddness and wit are intact.

Originally fitted with female breasts and male genitalia (the penis was removed when the robot was shipped to a censorship-prone New York City the same year), K-456 was designed to be sociable, political and a little gross. Rolling down a city sidewalk, it waved, bowed, broadcast a tape of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, and periodically defecated white beans. Like much of Paik’s work, it was both conceptually sophisticated and kid stuff, the way Ryan Trecartin’s comic-apocalyptic YouTube productions are now.

It was also a prototype for more polished things to come. In the 1980s, Paik built a family of robots — father, mother, baby — from stacked-up vintage television monitors. Looking as monumental and boxy as armored samurai, the figures didn’t move, but were internally animated by video montages playing on their many screens with images of war planes, Korean porcelains, African crowds and abstract shapes flashing by too fast to be taken in at a glance but constantly repeated, like online news.

Paik made a variety of such video sculptures. Some took a swipe at a knee-jerk celebration of technological “progress.” The interactive 1968 “TV Chair” has no more elevated function than to video-surveil a given sitter’s derrière. At the same time, Paik fully understood that technology was here to stay, commanding and inexorable, and he wanted to use art to soften its effects, reduce its might, tease it, tweak it, make it enlightenment friendly. One way he maintained this perspective was by working with like-minded human collaborators, mostly artists, with the most important being Charlotte Moorman.

Moorman was born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1933. She studied musical composition at Centenary College in Shreveport, La., but also trained as an instrumentalist and in 1957 moved to New York to study the cello at Juilliard. Although she played the standard repertoire and did a stint with Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra, she was attracted to experimental music and gained a reputation for playing the unplayable, including some of Cage’s more intensely micromanaged scores. With her full figure, cascading dark hair and pale skin, she was a charismatic visual presence onstage. Paik met her in New York in 1964, and they bonded instantly.

Both thrived on controversy. Paik was eager to give vanguard music, so spiky and taxing, the sensuous aura he felt was necessary to attract a general audience. He looked to Moorman to provide that, and she did. For a piece called “Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only” she played Bach while doing a striptease. She performed Paik’s composition “Opera Sextronique” in the nude, as called for by the score, and earned news headlines — far more valuable than reviews — when she was arrested on a charge of public indecency.

In part because she was a woman, and one who at least ostensibly exploited traditional models of femininity, her role in late-20th-century American vanguard culture has been undervalued, though not by Paik. After her death from breast cancer in 1991, he created a memorial tribute to her at the 1993 Venice Biennale, with articles of her clothing floating like spirits on high. That installation is replicated in the Asia Society show, organized by Michelle Yun, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art. And a new book, “Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman” by Joan Rothfuss, due in mid-October from the MIT Press, gives a full and evenhanded account of her accomplishments.

The book provides exactly the kind of fresh, re-evaluative information the catalog lacks, but even without it, the show lets us see Paik in a somewhat new light, not as an Asian artist, exactly, but not as a Western artist either, or even as an artist generically “global.” Specific references to Asia recur in his work: A robot brandishes a book of verse by the great Tang dynasty poet Li Po (A.D. 701-762); a statue of a meditating Buddha contemplates its own image on a video screen. The paint-smeared late televisions, mere souvenirs of a long career, suggest the brash, hand-altered, recycling spirit of technological culture in Beijing and Mumbai today.

And then there’s the installation “Three Camera Participation/Participation TV” (1969/2001) in a gallery of its own. Consisting of three cameras, a video monitor and a projector, the piece barely exists until someone enters and activates it. Only when you walk in front of the cameras does an image appear: your own, as three hazy colored silhouettes — red, green and blue — on the monitor and as a kind of barely embodied aura on the gallery wall. Step out of camera range, and the image is gone. In much of his art, Paik used technology, busy and brash, to create the equivalent of the wake-up slap of Zen master. Very occasionally, as here, he uses it to say something about nothing — about words, and information, and connectivity going away — and that takes mastery, too.

Photo via Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan.com

According to the Daily Mail, Damien Hirst, the most famous of the original YBAs, has snapped up one of London’s “grandest” homes for a reported £34 million ($57 million). The five story property, designed by architect John Nash, is described as “a stunning example of Regency architecture.” It was put on the market last year though it is believed that Hirst may have paid well above the listed price of £34 million, the report states.

The former enfant terrible is planning an extensive renovation of the property. The latest acquisition confirms his position as the “world’s most financially successful artist.” Hirst, who has a fortune of $369 million according to the story, already has an extensive real estate portfolio, including his main residence in North Devon, set on 24 acres. He also owns Toddington Manor, a 19th-century estate that has 300 rooms. Hirst’s tastes in property match his standing in the art market; he tops the artnet News list of the ten most expensive living British artists. In 2007 his cabinet Lullaby Spring sold for $19.2 million at Sotheby’s London.

Perhaps Hirst took a cue from top-selling American artist Jeff Koons, who is currently building his own mega-mansion on the Upper East Side. Hirst’s new digs have an “imposing” set of Greek pillars and a a frieze on the main structure. It was previously owned by Anne Van Lanschot, heir to a Dutch banking family. Princess Diana was reportedly a guest on at least one occasion.

The Daily Mail story calls Hirst’s acquisition his “new masterpiece” and points out “Shark tank not included,” a reference to his most famous work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), which Hirst created and sold to mega-collector Charles Saatchi for a reported £50,000. It was later sold to hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen for a price said to be around $8 million and loaned to the Metropolitan Museum—though only after Hirst swapped out the rotting original shark for a fresher specimen.

Hundreds of miles of rope transform park into work of art.

OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA.- It was Oklahoma’s wide open spaces and famous red dirt that inspired New York artist Orly Genger to envision her latest rope sculpture “Terra.” Now the artist is building her massive art in Oklahoma City on October 20 to be the first installation on the future home of the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center.

Made of 1.4 million feet of recycled lobster-fishing rope, and painted with 350 gallons of terra cotta colored paint, “Terra” will weave its way through the center section of Campbell Park, located at NW 11th and Broadway. The installation opens Monday, October 20, 2014, and runs through October, 2015.

“When visiting Oklahoma I was taken by the vastness of the open landscape and envisioned a line that would travel in a continual motion winding through the patch of land on which the work sits,” said Genger. The artist said the term “red dirt” inspired her color choice, “which relates both to the clay-like nature of the earth, and to the bricks with which we build walls.”

Dubbed the “rope wrangler”, Genger hand knits and shapes hundreds of miles of discarded lobster rope into massive sculptures that traverse the space and incorporates the piece into the landscape. Her art encourages visitors to explore the terrain in a new way and interact with the larger-than-life pieces.

Since 2005, Genger has completed several large-scale installations featuring colorful masses of hand-knotted rope. These include “Red, Yellow and Blue” in Madison Square Park, New York City and deCordova Sculpture Park in Boston and most recently, “Current” in Austin, Texas.

The artist’s transformation of discarded rope and its homage to Oklahoma is a fitting way to mark Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center’s move to downtown Oklahoma City. The center is moving from its longtime location on the state fairgrounds and building a new arts campus on a previously vacant lot at NW 11th and Broadway.

“I'm honored to be the first artist to exhibit near the future site of Oklahoma Contemporary,” said Genger. “This is an exciting time for the organization and for Oklahoma City; it's energizing to be a part of it.”                  

Despite setbacks that threatened its existence, part of his dream has now been realized. Last year, Mass MoCA attracted a record 162,000 visitors. It adds more than $20 million a year to the regional economy, including the businesses that rent its surplus space, according to the Center for Creative Community Development at Williams College. And it has become a model for hundreds of other localities hoping to use culture as an economic driver.

“Mass MoCA has become a really important asset in North Adams,” said Jamie Bennett, executive director of ArtPlace America, which awards grants to encourage such “creative placemaking” pursuits around the country.

Ripe for growth, Mass MoCA will now spread into nearly all corners of its 26-building campus. It will double its exhibition space to 260,000 square feet — more than DIA:Beacon’s 240,000 square feet in Beacon, N.Y., and just shy of the total gallery space at the sprawling Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

But the expansion will again test Mass MoCA, which has teetered several times before and since its opening in 1999. Most notably, the museum brushed with financial disaster in 2006, thanks to the exploding costs of a vast, unfinished installation by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. It blew past its $165,000 limit to about $385,000, driving the budget “to the brink,” Mr. Thompson said, when Mass MoCA had no endowment and no cash reserve. An ensuing dispute — Mr. Büchel charged that Mass MoCA had mismanaged the project and had allowed some people to see the work before completion, while the museum called his demands unreasonable and said he had abandoned the project — landed in court, and though the parties eventually settled, both sullied their reputations in the process.

Since then, in some eyes, Mass MoCA has lost some of its appetite for risk. The expansion conceived by Mr. Thompson, aside from putting new pressure on the museum’s small staff, $7 million annual budget and minuscule $3 million endowment (plus $12 million in reserves), may further challenge the museum’s stated identity as “an experimental platform for art making.” His plans call for Mass MoCA to devote half its exhibition space to art that already exists.

By the time it opened, Mass MoCA had already evolved from its initial conception as a visual arts museum. After listening to donors and neighboring institutions like the Jacob’s Pillow dance center, Mr. Thompson added performing arts to the mix. The museum devotes “a full 50 percent of our curatorial and financial and emotional bandwidth to the performing arts,” he said, from the Bang on a Can contemporary music festival to performances by Don Edwards, the cowboy poet. They appeal, in particular, to local audiences.

More recently, alongside new works by artists like Teresita Fernández and Darren Waterston, both now on view, Mr. Thompson has added galleries for works by contemporary masters. It started with a 25-year renewable venture with the Yale University Art Gallery that brought 105 of Sol LeWitt’s large-scale wall drawings to Mass MoCA, uniting them in one spot for the first time on nearly an acre of wall space.

When the installation opened in 2008, Holland Cotter of The New York Times called the setting “close to perfect.” For Mass MoCA, it was also close to a permanent collection, which it lacks. “Before that, everything we did changed every year, and when you change shows, the cupboard may be bare,” Mr. Thompson said.

One day last month, he showed off a second semi-permanent installation, which opened last September: three massive works by Anselm Kiefer borrowed from the Hall Art Foundation and installed in a renovated water tank building. The foundation paid for the revamping of the building, landscaping and most of the increased operating costs.

“We would never have done it ourselves,” Mr. Thompson said. “We focus on emerging and midcareer artists who want to make something large, and we like to fabricate the art with them. Kiefer has his own studio and doesn’t need our help. But he found the spaces here to be very compelling.”

Together, the LeWitt and Kiefer exhibitions have muddied Mass MoCA’s profile as a presenter of experimental art. Much of the public comes to see them. It was the Kiefer opening and the display of Xu Bing’s “Phoenix,” two gigantic birds made of detritus, that pushed 2013’s attendance far above the more typical 120,000 visitors.

Critical reaction has been split. “Christoph Büchel dragged Mass MoCA’s name through the mud, but it still has a significant reputation,” said Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. “They are as interested in exploring the fringe and what’s new as most significant contemporary art museums are in this country.”

But some curators at those museums, while declining to speak on the record for collegial reasons, disagree. Among the words they used to describe Mass MoCA’s curatorial program are “less ambitious than it once was,” “more middlebrow” and “gun shy.”

Michael Darling, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, noted, though, that since the recession, many museums have focused more on artists with name recognition. “There’s more wariness about taking on something too new or too experimental among us, including Mass MoCA,” he said.

Still, the artists Mass MoCA have selected credit it for allowing experimentation. Mr. Waterston, a painter, was invited to use a large wall as his canvas. Instead, he proposed “a much more ambitious project, on a very different scale, requiring more resources and more space,” he said. “I was responding to the nature of Mass MoCA,” he added, “and the kind of projects it is known for, projects that otherwise would never be realized.”

The work he created, “Filthy Lucre,” is a reimagining of James McNeill Whistler’s masterpiece of lavish decoration, “Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room,” which was the subject of a major row in 1876 between Whistler and a Liverpool patron over style, content and money. Mr. Waterston concocted it as a dramatic ruin: warped bookcases, overturned ceramics, a melting mural. The favorable review in The Boston Globe said that the work “ghoulishly satirizes the extreme wealth exemplified by Gilded Age industrialists, and draws a clear line to today’s 1 percent, buyers who snap up wildly expensive art on a whim and drive an overheated market.” “Filthy Lucre” will travel next year to the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, which owns Whistler’s “Peacock Room.”

Mr. Waterston praised the “incredible range of skills” of the artisans that Mass MoCA employs, who were key in its fabrication. “Even a huge institution like the Smithsonian could never have done it,” he said. “And it completely set me on a whole other trajectory. I’m not just a painter anymore.”

Performers like David Byrne have also used Mass MoCA as a petri dish. Citing Mr. Byrne’s “Here Lies Love,” his musical about Imelda Marcos, as an example, Mr. Thompson said, “David called and asked to work out aspects of it here,” which led to a five-night run there in June 2012.

Will the expansion swamp that identity? It calls for little change in space and budget for performing and homegrown visual arts programs (music, dance and theater festivals, as well as six or seven special exhibitions a year). Instead, the 120,000 square feet of new gallery space will be filled with installations like Mr. Kiefer’s.

Mr. Thompson is talking with four potential partners — artists, foundations and collectors — and he insists that these deals, with most expenses paid by the partner, are a strength, not a weakness. “There are enough institutions that program their own voice,” he said. “Multiple voices, sometimes contrary voices, strike me as more interesting.”

Undoubtedly, state officials were encouraged to ante up for the expansion by this low-risk formula and North Adams’s striking unemployment rate. Before Mass MoCA opened, it was seven times the state average, and at 8.1. percent this June, it was still higher than the 5.5 percent state rate. A bigger Mass MoCA, according to its own projections, is likely to draw 185,000 visitors a year, with many expected to linger in the area, spending money in hotels, restaurants and stores.

Imitators might find that Mass MoCA’s experience is not easily replicated, however. It started out with two undeniable assets: excess space, about 90 percent of which is now leased, and its location in the Berkshires, a summer tourist destination full of cultural assets, like the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art, both nearby in Williamstown. The three museums have benefited from “extraordinary synergy,” says Michael Conforti, director of the Clark, enhanced at times by joint ticketing. On July 4, the Clark opened expanded galleries, and once Mass MoCA grows, officials hope that day-trippers will become overnighters.

To complete Mr. Thompson’s plan, Mass MoCA must raise $30 million from private donors, about half for the museum’s endowment. “The expansion is unquestionably good for the region and the community; the challenge is to pull it off,” said Stephen C. Sheppard, director of Williams’s Center for Creative Community Development. “They will need to connect with people who share their vision and who’ll support it.”

State money will allow the expansion to begin, with the opening of new spaces, if all goes quickly, in 2016 — 30 years after Mass MoCA was proposed.