George Lindemann Journal

You Loved Me Like a Distant Star (2012)
Ms. Emin's neons are all hand-blown by London-based sign-maker Kerry Ryan, who then fills the glass with a mixture of neon, argon and mercury using a century-old technique. Lehmann Maupin

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The Scream (2002)
Many of the show's works, including "The Scream" from 2002, reflect Ms. Emin's struggle with feelings of depression. Ms. Emin believes her soul was "tangled up" in that of her twin brother, Paul. Tracey Emin/White Cube

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The Tracey Emin Museum (1995)
Kerry Ryan made Ms. Emin's first neon, shown here, for her studio in 1995. The two are now close friends, but upon meeting the "boisterous" artist, Mr. Ryan says he initially thought she was "a bit off her rocker." Tracey Emin/White Cube

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I Can Feel your Smile (2005)
The seemingly random capitalized letters in Tracey Emin's signs are cosmetic touches. Some letters such as "i" or "s" look better capitalized than others, she explains. Lehmann Maupin

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Meet Me in Heaven I Will Wait for You (2004)
Ms. Emin became famous for brassy, sexually explicit work, which are themes in some of her neons in the show. But the vast majority of her works deal with topics like love, God and depression. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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Only God Knows I'm Good (2009)
The green used in this sign is similar to that used in the neon signs of apothecaries in Europe, because it also glows during the day, says Ms. Emin. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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You Forgot to Kiss My Soul (2001)
Ms. Emin has never held a show of neons before, partly because the process of putting it together is so expensive that most museums would require that the show then travel to recoup costs, says Ms. Emin, who refuses to do traveling shows. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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Sorry Flowers Die (1999)
MOCA Miami was the first American museum to purchase one of Ms. Emin's works, a film called "Why I Never Became a Dancer," whichi will be screened at the exhibition. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

George Lindemann Journal

The Museum of Modern Art’s atrium has been home to any number of weird, wild and wacky goings-on. There was the time the performance artist Marina Abramovic sat there for 700 hours, and another when someone played a baby-grand piano from inside a hole that had been cut into it. There was also an installation of hazelnut pollen, and even a giant garage sale.

For its next act, the Modern will install nine double-sided screens, measuring up to 23 feet wide and hung at different heights, that will project a work by the British artist Isaac Julien, “Ten Thousand Waves”; it will be on view starting Monday. The installation deals with the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, when 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned off the coast of northwest England. It incorporates archival footage from a police helicopter showing the rescue of one survivor from a sandbank. There are also audio recordings of distress calls and images of contemporary Chinese culture. (Through Feb. 17; moma.org.)

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George Lindemann Journal

Work by Michelle Lopez will be among the sculptures appearing in the 2013 Art Basel Miami Beach Art Public sector.

Man is by nature a social animal…Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

— Aristotle, Politics

Those of us who fall into the middling range of mere mortals may especially enjoy this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach Art Public sector, with works chosen especially to reflect the exhibition’s theme of “Social Animals.”

Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of New York’s Public Art Fund, selected two dozen works that play on the collective and social nature of a public park. The artists invited to show at Collins Park this year range from emerging to emeritus. There’s even a posthumous display by Charlotte Posenenske, a German artist known for her minimalist works — particularly her steel sculptures resembling ventilation parts. Gallerists Mehdi Chouakri and Peter Freeman are teaming up to recreate six works from her Vierkanthrohre (Square Tubes) Serie D, among the last works she created before abruptly ending her career in the late 1960s. Ironically, during her self-imposed exile from the art world until her death in 1985, Posenenske questioned the worth of public art.

For Silvia Karman Cubiñá, that worth is not questionable at all. As executive director and chief curator of the Bass Museum – which once again joined Art Basel in Miami Beach to produce the outdoor exhibit outside the museum’s front entrance – Cubiñá has seen first-hand how the public interacts with the art previously displayed in Collins Park. Of particular note were six chaise-shaped concrete slabs created by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, Cubiñá says, explaining how different groups of people would gravitate to the works.

“They turned into a meeting point, which became lovely, because there would be different populations that would crowd around it,” she says. “Early in the morning we had a lot of homeless people that were having breakfast. Then a little later, the dog walkers. Then at 3 o’clock the students who came from the high school would gather there, and some of them started coming into the museum. Then again the dog walkers; then again the homeless people. So, there were different populations, and I just saw it as a gathering place that came together around art.”

This year British sculptor Thomas Houseago is expected to provide visitors with a similar experience. In addition to his Striding Figure (Rome 1), Houseago plans to provide two studio seats and a chaise lounge, which will be an open invitation for the public to drape themselves across his sculptures. Danish artist Jeppe Hein also is expected to add a bit of interactive art with his Appearing Rooms, a constantly changing sculpture in which jets of water form a labyrinth of wet walls that can end up soaking those who get too close. Matias Faldbakken presents a full-scale adaptation of a Peterbilt 281 big rig truck.

This year’s exhibit in the park, which fronts the museum and spans the area between 17th and 25th streets, is aimed to satisfy the senses from sight to sound and runs through March 31. According to Cubiñá, a grant from the Knight Foundation enabled the show to grow from its original four days to four months this year. As a result, she says, the museum plans to use the sculpture garden as a backdrop for its 50th anniversary in January, complete with a full orchestra in the park.

On the days when there is no orchestra, visitors to the park may hear the chirping of crickets, as imitated by a clarinet player. That’s courtesy of American artist Mungo Thomson, whose installation goes by the working title of “Cricket Solo for Clarinet.”

Abstract expressionist Mark di Suvero, 80, is the show’s oldest artist. His monumental work, Exemplar, was created in 1979 and consists of two intersecting I-beans. British land artist Richard Long will also be showing an earlier work. His Higher White Tor Circle was created in 1996 and is made up of Dartmoor granite chunks arranged in a mosaic-like circle.

George Lindemann Journal

For Thom Collins, director of the striking new Perez Art Museum Miami, the past couple of years have rushed by like the time lapse video of the construction project posted on the museum’s website: cranes moving in; rebar and concrete materializing; walls and columns shooting up; wrap-around terraces stretching out — all at dizzying speed.

Museum director Thom Collins walks among the works being installed on Tuesday October 29, 2013 for the opening in December 2013 of the Perez Art Museum Miami.

PATRICK FARRELL

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“When I was growing up in Philadelphia, we went to the art museum every month. I think the PAMM could emerge as that kind of institution for Miami, a culturally oriented town center where people and ideas meet, and where you know you will always find thoughtful, sophisticated programming.’’

Soon after arriving in Miami, Collins, who favors skinny suits and square-framed glasses, moved to a working-class neighborhood bordering art-centric Wynwood, determined to understand from the inside this young city experiencing a modern cultural boom.

“This is a place with such dynamic cultural diversity, and that gives it such potential. This is a city where the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the New World Center, the new science museum and the PAMM are all going up within a period of about 10 years. That’s remarkable. That’s instant cultural infrastructure.”

The PAMM is scheduled to open during Art Basel week, on time and within budget — though not without its share of controversy over its name honoring Miami developer Jorge Perez, who in 2010 donated $40 million in cash and art. Still, Collins is celebrating the fact that the museum has locked in more than 90 percent of its $220 million fundraising goal ($100 million came from public funds).

“There is a lot of aspiration in Miami. And a recognition that we are building a real repository for the city’s shared cultural heritage. You can see this in the support the museum is receiving.”

Collins himself managed to gain broad support from the community almost from the time he arrived — which is no small feat.

“Thom makes it all look easy,” says Michael Spring, director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. “For the whole cultural community to move forward, you have to have top leaders at the flagship institutions who are steady professionals, who can earn the respect of the people around them.

“When you talk to Thom, you get a sense of confidence. This is someone who is a national leader in the visual arts. And he is charming, funny, good in social situations, which is very important when it comes to building relationships with donors and collectors.”

George Lindemann Journal

"Immigrant Drama on Nine Screens" by Kelly Crow

In the late 1980s, Isaac Julien became a hit of London's contemporary art scene by projecting his lush films about poets and protesters onto multiple, dangling screens, rather than one. The video artist was among the first to ask viewers to move around his films instead of simply sitting down.

The George Lindemann Journal

Fine art helps sell real estate in South Florida

By Ina Paiva Cordle

icordle@MiamiHerald.com

George Lindemann Journal - www.georgelindemann.com

Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1

Francesco Vezzoli’s Art Show Hits a Snag

Alfonso Di Vincenzo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The church packed for its planned trip to New York.

By TED LOOS and GAIA PIANIGIANI

Published: November 25, 2013

It was a typically elaborate, provocative move by the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli in a career full of them: He had contracted to buy the ruins of an old deconsecrated church in the southern Italian town of Montegiordano and had planned to ship them to New York, brick by brick, for exhibition in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. His videos would be shown inside.

But “The Church of Vezzoli,” as the exhibition was to be called, was canceled Monday in the midst of a legal imbroglio in Italy; some of the ruins now sit in containers at the Port of Gioia Tauro, while others lie stacked in plastic at the chapel site, on an estate in Calabria.

Local prosecutors are evaluating whether Mr. Vezzoli was trying to export items of artistic and cultural value without authorization, a crime carrying a fine or jail time up to four years. No formal charges have been filed against him, but they could come later.

“All of a sudden, it all exploded, and I feel I was hit by a tornado,” said Mr. Vezzoli, 42, from his home Milan. “I’m in a state of shock.”

Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, said he had learned of the troubles from Mr. Vezzoli about six weeks ago and that the museum has been left scrambling. “Part of curating is to come up with new ideas — and I started this morning,” Mr. Biesenbach said on Friday.

Mr. Vezzoli, a native of Brescia, Italy, is used to a high level of celebrity and he has been known for his cheekiness in addressing religion in his art. His 2011 show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, “Sacrilegio,” featured images of weeping Madonnas, each with the superimposed face of a supermodel, including Cindy Crawford’s.

His best-known work, the 2005 film “Trailer for the Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula,” featured Helen Mirren, Courtney Love and a fleet of barely clad actors. In 2006, he made himself the subject of a fake version of an E! channel “True Hollywood Story” show that purported to detail his own scandalous behavior.

Now, a real potential scandal is nipping at his heels.

Mr. Vezzoli said that he identified the Montegiordano ruins, about 300 miles southeast of Rome, a year and a half ago, and went about contracting to buy what he called “a skeleton of a building” for around $100,000 from the owner, who had built a new church in front of the old one. The artist said that he had the blessing of the town’s mayor.

“It was falling down the hill,” he said. “We almost felt we were doing some good.”

The deconstruction process had been going on for six months when, in late October,   a passer-by wrote to complain to the Ministry of Culture, and the superintendent in charge of the Calabria region blocked it.

“I got a phone call that I am under criminal investigation,” Mr. Vezzoli said.

Mr. Vezzoli’s lawyer, Massimo Sterpi, argued that in an examination of the estate in 1988, the regional superintendent had not found the church to have cultural or historical value as a monument. But Francesco Prosperetti, the current art superintendent of Calabria, said on Monday, “Under Italian law, the owners should have asked for an authorization to remove the decorative elements from any historic building,” regardless of cultural value.

Mr. Sterpi, the lawyer, says that the artist is not even the legal owner of the ruins. Mr. Vezzoli’s preliminary contract stipulates that the deal is final only when the church is dismantled, provided that the building had already been deemed free of any restriction on legal, religious or national heritage grounds.

“We never managed to sign the final contract,” Mr. Sterpi said, adding that the export process had not been initiated because the ruins were not entirely dismantled. “I am confident that Mr. Vezzoli will prove his innocence and good faith,” he said. “However, the show is over.”

Mr. Vezzoli said that the decision about the church’s status as a possible artistic treasure would take at least four months.

“Even if we win, it’s a Pyrrhic victory,” he said. “We won’t need it by then.”

The MoMA PS1 show was meant to be the third leg of “The Trinity,” a multicity retrospective of Mr. Vezzoli’s work. “Galleria Vezzoli” just ended this past weekend at the Maxxi museum of contemporary art in Rome. “Cinema Vezzoli” is now scheduled to open in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Mr. Biesenbach said he and Mr. Vezzoli would meet to look for a new way to show his works at the museum later in 2014. But Mr. Vezzoli said he was not ready to consider another building.

“It’s like love — if this church turns you down, you can’t fall in love again right away,” he said. “My Juliet is being kept captive.”

Mr. Biesenbach suggested that the legal troubles, while unfortunate, dovetailed in some strange way with Mr. Vezzoli’s work. He added that the controversy had aspects of “a real-time performance.”

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A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1.

George Lindemann Journal - www.georgelindemann.com

George Lindemann Journal

The Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler show at Casey Kaplan.

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: November 21, 2013

525 West 21st Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 21

In their first collaboration, Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler stay within their comfort zones but manage to nudge us out of ours. Their familiar methods of institutional critique (photographic in Ms. Lawler’s case, sculptural for Mr. Gillick) combine to form a dynamic, disorienting installation.

Mr. Gillick’s contribution is a text piece composed of cutout aluminum sentences, which hang from the ceiling in neat rows and lure readers deeper and deeper into the gallery. Gradually, it reveals a vague and halting narrative about workers at a defunct factory (the Volvo plant in Kalmar, Sweden, as the news release tells us).

Ms. Lawler contributes a striking background, a long vinyl wall sticker that links the three rooms of the gallery. The image printed on it is a stretched-out version of some of her earlier photographs of artworks in bland white-box settings; here, pieces by Degas, Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, among others, are distorted beyond recognition.

The collaborative ethos of the show, the references to the socialist history of Volvo production, the relentless conveyor belt of the installation and the content of Ms. Lawler’s photographs (individual artworks by top-selling male artists, blended into a single seamless strip) all signal discomfort with the rah-rah capitalism of the current art market. But no alternatives are proposed, and the installation leaves us with a haunting vision of a factory in limbo. As Mr. Gillick’s text puts it, “No one has secured the building, and no one has wrecked it either.”

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George Lindemann Journal

Rosemarie Trockel’s sculpture “Copy Me,” in her show at the Gladstone gallery, may look velvety but is cast in steel.

515 West 24th Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 21

This exhibition of new work by the internationally admired German conceptualist Rosemarie Trockel has three parts, one good, two not so good. Best is “Copy Me,” a modern sofa cast in steel, with a velvety looking, rusty surface. Nearly 14 feet long, it resembles seating for an institutional waiting room. It’s divided into two parts, each exactly like the other but in reverse; they’re mirror images. It also has a sheet of transparent plastic draped over it, which brings to mind plastic-wrapped furniture in the living rooms of some obsessively clean homeowners.

As a deflating response to industrial steel sculpture like Richard Serra’s, “Copy Me” scores some feminist points, but it’s deceptive formal complexity and deadpan surrealism saves it from being an ideological one-liner.

Less provocative are works resembling Modernist stripe paintings, which, on close inspection, turn out to be made of lengths of colored yarn. Though visually attractive — except for the ugly, plexiglass boxes containing most of them — they add little to the Postmodernist tradition of critique by parody.

Installed in a separate room are sculptural pieces in which cuts of meat cast in plaster — some painted pale colors, some unpainted — are attached to variously shaped, transparent plexiglass panels. Like the yarn works, they’re didactic, albeit obliquely so. They seem to point to a butcherlike relationship between capitalistic humans and the rest of nature. They are visually wan; they could use some of the visceral horror of Paul Thek’s meat sculptures.

George Lindemann Journal

Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon were rivals as well as friends. That scratching sound you hear is Freud clawing at his coffin at the news last week that Bacon’s 1969 portrait of him, a triptych titled “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” went for $142.4 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

The painting it displaced (sold for $119.9 million in 2012) is Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Which is perfect, because that’s the face Freud would have made. He’d have preferred it the other way around, that his 1951 portrait of Bacon smash the record. That’s some painting, as well. Robert Hughes compared Bacon’s face in it to “a hand grenade on the point of detonation.”

Too bad it was stolen from a Berlin gallery in 1988 and hasn’t been seen since, except on “Wanted” posters.

I don’t mean to make Freud sound insecure and vile. Geordie Greig does a handy enough job of that in his new book, “Breakfast With Lucian,” a volume of prying and sabotage dressed up to resemble a book of love.

Freud, whose sexually loaded and densely impastoed portraits made him probably the most important British artist of the second half of the 20th century, died in 2011 at 88. He was intensely private. He granted few interviews and fended off at least one potential biographer, Mr. Greig reports, with the help of hired goons.

Until we have a proper biography, we have this book, written by the editor of The Mail on Sunday, whom Freud admitted into his circle in the final years of his life, or at least far enough that they had breakfast together more than a handful of times. Freud was old and feeble; he let his guard down. Bad move, old bean.

“Breakfast With Freud,” Mr. Greig writes in a mystifying author’s note, was composed “mostly by BlackBerry.” (Even if this were true, why would you admit it?) It displays little feeling for Freud’s work. Its history is patchy. Its tone is frequently what you’d get if you set Robin Leach loose at the Tate Modern.

There was “a Hollywood glamour to this brown-eyed temptress,” we read about one of Freud’s early lovers. Freud and Caroline Blackwood, a Guinness heiress, who would become his second wife, were “the most talked-about young lovers in London, with hidebound society agog.” Young Freud and another temptress “canoodled.”

“Breakfast With Freud” is seldom boring, though, which is something. It is so force-fed with gossip and incident — brawling, rutting, gambling, cuckolding, exacting revenge — that Freud comes off as equal parts Cecil Beaton (society dandy) and Charles Bukowski (crusty bum). He was the original werewolf of London.

The lunatic details start early and keep coming. You turn each page the way a rat hits the little lever for another pellet of crack.

Who knew, for example, that Freud had an obsession “with a Johnny Cash song about swapping his brain with a chicken when the chicken was robbing banks”? (This unlistenable novelty is “The Chicken in Black,” but never mind.) Or that he was caught naked dancing to “Sunday Girl,” the Blondie song?

It’s pretty well known that Freud gave Kate Moss a tramp stamp, made up of two tiny swallows. (Freud supplies to Mr. Greig the unlikely detail that this went down in the back of a London cab.) It’s probably less well known that Freud could imitate a whale masturbating.

At 84, Freud “chucked breadsticks at a man who used flash to take a photograph in the Wolseley,” a London restaurant. That fellow got off easy. A boxer when young, Freud loved to thump or head-butt his fellow Britons. One of his daughters recalls, “Dad used to hit taxi drivers and punched people in the street if he didn’t like the look of them.”

My favorite anecdote, melee division — it’s about the art dealer Jay Jopling — goes this way: “A dapper Old Etonian with signature ‘Joe 90’ glasses, Jopling had been having a quiet drink in Green Street, a dining club in Mayfair, when Lucian entered the room and attacked him. ‘He kicked me on the shins, grabbed the girl I was talking to and walked out with her,’ he said.”

Freud leapt on women (and occasionally men) throughout his life as if he were a flying squirrel in paint-flecked work boots. This volume goes long on his “serial sexual opportunism,” his playing of “musical beds on a grand and anarchic scale.” He married twice, and has many acknowledged and unacknowledged children, but always had overlapping lovers. These women had to poke though his work in progress to see whom else he was sleeping with.

In Mr. Greig’s account, he could be a sadist. “He became quite vicious, really hurt breasts and things,” a lover comments. He liked anal sex with women, an acquaintance reports, because it was redolent of utter domination. In restaurants, he grabbed at waitresses’ thighs.

He liked his girls young — as young as 16, 17 or 18. He got them to his home by offering to paint them, often obtrusively naked. A 22-year-old managed to fend him off, and we read about an early painting session: “He started walking up and down and gesturing as he undid his belt.” After a fight with one lover, he mailed her “a postcard with a crude drawing of her defecating.” No dummy, she held onto it.

Freud painted with agonizing slowness and required his models to be present for every brush stroke. Sessions could drag on for more than a year. After sitting for four months for a Freud portrait, of her breast-feeding her son by Mick Jagger, the model Jerry Hall was late for a session or two. Freud got revenge, we read, by erasing her from the painting. He inserted a man in her place. “Lucian liked to have a pet hate or feud,” Mr. Greig observes.

We do witness Freud commit acts of kindness and generosity in this well-illustrated book, but they are few and far between. In the stray details accumulated here, sinisterly speckled onto the page like Ralph Steadman’s ink blots, he is mostly cruel, loutish, self-centered.

Freud probably was all of these things, some or most of the time. But there is never a sense of seeing him whole in “Breakfast With Lucian.” Mr. Greig turns him into a cartoon, a man without texture.

Almost our last image of Freud here, appropriately enough, is of him two years before death, during a photo shoot, impulsively bopping a wild zebra on the nose. The animal bolted, and he clung to it. He was sent to the hospital with a groin strain, though many feared he’d been hurt much worse.

It all worked out, sort of. Kate Moss showed up, we read, and gave the wicked genius “a cuddle in bed.”