George Lindemann Journa by George Lindemann - "At MoMA, a New Plan to Resolve Old Issues" @wsj By Julie V. Iovine

The proposed plan for an expanded Museum of Modern Art. Diller Scofidio + Renfro

A solution had seemed imminent. Last May, following an outcry over its plan to demolish the American Folk Art Museum, a highly admired architectural gem in the path of its latest expansion scheme along 53rd Street, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had hired the New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

There was a huge sigh of relief. These are architects known for tackling the most intractable design problems with creative ingenuity. They were key players in reimagining the abandoned railroad tracks that are now the world-famous High Line Park; they deftly made the sprawling Lincoln Center more hospitable to people and connected to the city; they are art-world familiars, having started their practice with high-concept museum installations more inspired by Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement than by the Bauhaus or Le Corbusier. Surely if any one could, they would be able to find a way to reconcile the intensely crafted cast-bronze facade of the American Folk Art Museum with the inscrutably sleek glass and steel of MoMA.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro had six months to look at the problem and they valiantly explored every option before coming up blank with a way to save the American Folk Art Museum. Last week, they recommended its demolition. Their expansion proposal includes adding 30% more gallery space, new entrance and lobby treatments for both 53rd and 54th streets, and a public-plaza-cum-performance-art space on the site of the razed folk-art museum. The plan was quickly approved by the MoMA board, and the American Folk Art Museum is to be torn down by June. Just 12 years old, the structure cost $17.4 million to build and was designed by New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, contemporaries and friends of the principals at Diller Scofidio + Renfro. At a press conference, Elizabeth Diller described a wrenching visit to the other architects' office to deliver the news personally. In response, Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien issued their own statement: "This action represents a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many."

You might wonder why we should care if one more quirky little building disappears from the streets of New York. After all, buildings come and go all the time; no one knows this better than architects. But the American Folk Art Museum is a casualty of a different sort, and tearing it down will not usher in the new era of popularity that MoMA seems to be aiming for.

The problem was never simply that the folk-art museum—multistoried and petite at 15,500 square feet—was too idiosyncratic to be annexed (perhaps it could have been made into an executive suite). The problem is that the most recent $425 million MoMA expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi, completed in 2004, failed in many important ways to accommodate the museum's evolving vision of itself as a high-turnover, popular destination. Mr. Taniguchi provided an exquisitely conceptual play on the modernist principles of interlocking geometries and voids when what is now wanted is a trend-savvy cultural venue offering public hang-outs, performance spaces, interactive installations, restaurants and movie theaters, along with the art.

In a statement to museum members last week, MoMA's director, Glenn D. Lowry, described his vision: "Enlivening and participatory, the new MoMA will be a place for people of all ages and experiences to share their thoughts and questions with each other. It is a place for conversation, and a place for many stories." In other words, an Art Land entertainment complex.

The adjacent American Folk Art Museum, which must be demolished to make room for the new design. Giles Ashford

It is hardly surprising that Diller Scofidio + Renfro could not save the American Folk Art Museum while trying to give shape to this new vision and also solve other pressing incongruities left over from earlier additions, not only by Mr. Taniguchi, but also by Cesar Pelli in 1984 and by Philip Johnson in 1964. MoMA's piecemeal but exponential growth has always complicated the museum's determination to be a singular brand in the art world.

Among the most urgently needed fixes, the main entrance on 53rd Street is hard to locate amid several other museum doors—to the bookstore, to the movie theaters, to the chic restaurant and to the private residential Museum Tower confusingly in the middle of them all. Processing visitors through the subway-station-scaled lobby is grim, and the distance to arrive at any art at all is long and can be arduous if it means looking for the escalators, tucked out of sight as an embarrassing necessity. Getting around in general would be easier if crumbs to make a trail were provided along with the audio tours.

The architects' new plan looks like it will resolve these issues. A new canopy over the main entrance on 53rd Street is an easy and welcome fix. Opening up the beloved sculpture garden on 54th Street so that visitors can troop through to another main entrance is a lovely idea that one hopes won't turn the tranquil garden into the congested victim of its own popular success that the High Line has become. There will be 40,000 more square feet of gallery space flowing into three new floors belonging to MoMA but standing within an as-yet-unbuilt 82-story luxury condo immediately west of the site of the American Folk Art Museum. Circulation on the ground floor has been greatly clarified and a section of lobby ceiling raised. But it is hard to muster much excitement about the plan to use lots of transparent glass, the material of choice at hundreds of uninspired Midtown office buildings.

The cleared site of the folk-art museum gets special treatment: A glass box, called the Art Bay, will serve up exhibitions, performances and parties and feature a two-story mechanical wall—a kind of remote-control garage door in glass—that can open the space entirely to the street, as well as an elevating floor. Atop the Art Bay, another glass box is a hybrid gallery-performance space, for a total of more than 15,000 square feet for new activities.

The garage-door, street-party for art is the boldest gesture of the expansion plan. Large-scale moving parts are very big in architecture right now—from the waving brise-soleil at the Milwaukee Art Museum to a room-size elevator-gallery at the front of Sperone Westwater on the Bowery. Diller Scofidio + Renfro itself originally proposed that a movable plaza at Lincoln Center rise up from the underground parking lot and is currently working on a nested building that comes apart into an indoor-outdoor performance space at Hudson Yards. Movable walls are great in warm and grit-free climates—and outdoor installations have been a big summertime success for MoMA at PS1 in Queens—but for a design trick it sounds very expensive (not to mention noisy to operate and a nightmare to maintain) and of limited appeal for anyone other than party-hearty art-installation aficionados.

Lovers of a more intimate approach to experiencing art may cry foul, but clearly MoMA has its finger clamped on the pulse of the zeitgeist and is determined to lead the charge into the future.

So why should we mourn the loss of the delicate little American Folk Art Museum? It is the nature of cities and their institutions to grow and constantly redefine themselves. But one hopes that in the process of reshaping themselves, cities and their institutions will save bits of their best past selves. Here, however, not only will the street and the city be impoverished by the loss of a human-scaled and imaginatively wrought work of architecture. What is more distressing still is that Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien's American Folk Art Museum building is being sacrificed to a mushrooming monolith—one whose claims to want to embrace diverse experiences of art are contradicted from the start by its plans to destroy a prime example of that very impulse.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "MoMA: A Museum That Has Lost Its Way" @wsj by Eric Gibson

Not 10 years after its most recent, top-down renovation and expansion, the Museum of Modern Art is building again. Last week, director Glenn D. Lowry announced the broad outlines of plans for yet another enlargement on its western end. This one will embrace three floors of a residential tower being designed by Jean Nouvel and the site of the former American Folk Art Museum, a 2001 Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building that will be demolished. Clearly MoMA is a museum in a hurry. But to go where?

When the Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building opened in 2004, it looked as if Mr. Lowry's model for the new MoMA had been London's Tate Gallery. Prior to the arrival of new directors, Nicholas Serota at the Tate in 1988 and Mr. Lowry at MoMA in 1995, the two museums shared many traits. Both had storied collections: MoMA's was classic modernism—roughly from the late 1880s through the 1940s—while the Tate's was British art from 1600 to the present. Though both mounted exhibitions of contemporary art, they were prevented from engaging with the present in anything close to a full-bore fashion by institutional inertia and limitations of space.

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Pablo Picasso's 'Guitar' (1914). Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In 2000 Mr. Serota opened Tate Modern, a decommisioned power station on the Thames that had been refurbished as a museum of international modern art and a kunsthalle, its cavernous spaces dedicated to exhibitions of the latest installation art and similar experimental work. The same year the original 1897 museum was rechristened "Tate Britain" and dedicated to British art, historic and contemporary.

The MoMA unveiled in 2004 was likewise a hybrid institution. In addition to galleries for temporary exhibitions and the permanent collection, the new facility featured a 110-foot-tall atrium gallery, a media gallery and a block-wide, high-ceilinged, column-free space with reinforced floors, all new to MoMA and designed for contemporary art. Mr. Lowry is thinking along the same lines this time. One of the few details in his announcement was "a new flexible, double-height glass-walled gallery for contemporary art and performance."

Mr. Lowry deserves credit for making MoMA part of the contemporary-art conversation. The public now expects museums to show new art, and without accomodating its audience MoMA risked slowly drifting into irrelevance. If much of its contemporary fare comes across as slight or superficial, more stunts than anything else—notably Marina Abramović's 2010 performance in which museum visitors were invited to sit and stare into her eyes for as long as they could stand it while she remained immobile—well, such are the times we live in.

But there's one big difference between the Tate and MoMA: Mr. Serota's commitment to the new has not come at the expense of the old. While Tate Modern has been expanding, he has overseen a complete reinstallation of Tate Britain's permanent collection, placing some 500 works on view to reveal the full sweep of British art. It opened to wide acclaim last year.

By contrast, MoMA under Mr. Lowry has long seemed to have an ambivalent, even hostile relationship to its own past. The first indication came with "MoMA2000," a millennium-timed sequence of collection reinstallations that replaced its traditional chronological organization with one that mixed artists, periods and styles. In so doing it abandoned its longstanding view of the history of modern art as a steady evolution driven by a succession of innovators, a view famously codified by founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. in the "family tree" of modern art he published in the 1930s. Instead, we got a level playing field where all artists were equally accomplished and notable mainly for their "affinities." Thus Paul Cézanne's "Bather" (c.1885) was juxtaposed with a 1993 photograph of a boy in a bathing suit by contemporary Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra—the man famously described by Picasso as "the father of us all" simply one artist among many working with the figure.

Then, when the Taniguchi building opened four years later, I and some others noticed that despite the dramatic increase in total exhibition space—to 125,000 square feet from 85,000—the museum seemed to have fewer works of classic modernism on view than before the expansion. My hunch received a confirmation of sorts when I called the press office and was rebuffed in my request for those before-and-after numbers. We prefer to talk about square feet, I was told. Nothing has changed since to dispel that initial impression.

Finally, there is what can only be described as MoMA's rapacious campaign of deaccessioning. In a May 2004 article, cultural journalist and blogger Lee Rosenbaum reported in the Journal that MoMA had sold nine paintings from the permanent collection at that year's spring auctions for a total of $25.65 million. But this was, she wrote, "just the tip of the iceberg."

"In the past five years MoMA has sold 12 other works from its painting and sculpture collection and hundreds more from other departments," she continued. "What makes MoMA's sales unusual is the quality and financial value of its offerings, which include major works by two of modernism's defining masters, Picasso and Braque."

One of the biggest of these was the 2003 sale of Picasso's "Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro" (1909), a proto-Cubist landscape from one of the most important phases of the artist's career. In pre-Taniguchi days it could often be seen hanging with "The Reservoir, Horta," a closely related work painted during the same "campaign." When asked about this sale by Ms. Rosenbaum, "Mr. Lowry observed that there would be 'nothing wrong' with having both pictures, 'if we were a Picasso museum.'"

This was a foolish thing to say because, as Mr. Lowry well knows, MoMA is a Picasso museum—of sorts. Until Paris's Museé Picasso opened in October 1985 MoMA's collection was the biggest and most comprehensive anywhere, and a key feature of its identity. In the catalog preface of his 1972 exhibition "Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art," then-chief curator William Rubin proudly announced that the group of 85 paintings and sculptures on view "constitutes by far the most complete and important public collection of Picasso's art, boasts a number of his unique masterpieces, and offers a virtually step-by-step revelation of the development of his Cubism." It was in recognition of the museum's longstanding commitment to his work that in 1971 Picasso donated his sheet metal "Guitar" (1914), arguably the most important work of 20th-century sculpture.

Still, Mr. Lowry's comment spoke volumes about his vision of the museum. Small wonder that cosmetics heir Leonard A. Lauder last year decided to give his unparalleled collection of 78 Cubist paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art rather than MoMA.

For all its success—expansions existing and planned, huge crowds, lots of buzz—MoMA today is an institution that has lost its way. Disconnected from its past, impatient with the present and tearing into the future under the vague banner of "The New," it has ceased to be the sui generis institution it had been throughout much of its history. Instead it is virtually indistinguishable from every other museum of modern and contemporary art around the world.

The proposed expansion offers the museum a chance to reanchor itself. The new megaMoMA will add 40,000 square feet of gallery space to what it has now. If it chooses to, it will be able to mount the broadest, deepest and in every way most comprehensive installation of classic modernism in its history. The reception of its recent exhibition "Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925" suggests there's as large a constituency for that as for the museum's contemporary programming. It drew nearly one million visitors during its four month run.

How does MoMA now see the history of modern art? How does it propose to make sense of all that has happened since the 1880s? Above all, when it comes to classic modernism, does it think that the past is just another country, or of continued relevance to the art life of our time?

The answers to these questions will determine MoMA's identity for a long time to come, and with it the way Mr. Lowry's tenure is remembered.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts editor.

Write to Eric Gibson at eric.gibson@wsj.com

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - George Lindemann - "A Spot Painting With a Cartoon Past: Hirst Makes a Mickey" @nytimes  by GRAHAM BOWLEY

Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates; Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. DACS 2013Damien Hirst’s “Mickey.”

People see a lot of different things when they look at a Damien Hirst spot painting.

Candy dots. Pills. And now they can conjure Mickey Mouse as well.

Mr. Hirst was asked by Disney to come up with his interpretation of the cartoon character – which will now be sold for charity.

The result is “Mickey,” household gloss on canvas, which shows a jumble of Hirst’s colored spots against a white background – including big black dot ears, a red dot mouth, and yellow dot feet.

Together, they depict a rather bouncy Mickey Mouse — a jauntiness in contrast to Mr. Hirst’s dead shark swimming in formaldehyde or his platinum human skull paved with 8,601 diamonds.

“Mickey Mouse represents happiness and the joy of being a kid and I have reduced his shape down to the basic elements of a few simple spots,” Mr. Hirst said in a statement.

The painting will be auctioned for Kids Company, a charity that helps vulnerable inner-city children and young people, at Christie’s in London on February 13.

Disney said Mr. Hirst was the latest in a line of artists to be inspired by the famous mouse, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg.

Francis Outred, head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s Europe called Mickey Mouse “an icon of cartoon and consumer culture and one of the classic designs of the twentieth century.”

Disney said there are no plans for a Hirst Donald Duck.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Critics Voice Objections to MoMA’s Plan to Take Down Folk Art Museum" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

| To the surprise of perhaps no one, including the Museum of Modern Art, the decision to take down the former home of the American Folk Art Museum as part of a redesign of MoMA’s Midtown Manhattan building provoked strong reactions on Thursday from architects and critics.

“I’m very disappointed,” said Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of Yale’s School of Architecture. “Justice has not been served.

“It’s a work of art, especially the facade,” he added of the Folk Art building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which opened in 2001 and features a textured bronze exterior.

Having announced plans in April to demolish the folk museum, MoMA revisited the decision after protests from architects, urban planners and preservationists. But the architectural firm charged with that evaluation, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, concluded that saving the building was unworkable, even as it proposed that MoMA undertake a more comprehensive rethinking of its physical complex.

MoMA now plans to make its current building — designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi nine years ago in a $858 million renovation — more open and welcoming. The plans include improving circulation in the lobby and making the entire ground level free to the public. The folk art site will hold two stacked glass-fronted spaces for exhibitions and performances.

Architecture critics quickly weighed in against the demolition plan. “A city that allows such a work to disappear after barely a dozen years is a city with a flawed architectural heart,” Paul Goldberger wrote on Vanity Fair’s website.

Jerry Saltz, on New York magazine site, said that during MoMA’s presentation of the project, “I felt my eyes tear up and my stomach turn.”

“I have seen the best modern museum of my generation destroyed by madness,” he wrote. “Goodbye, MoMA. I loved you.”

Not every reaction was negative. Thom Mayne, who designed the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art’s new building in Manhattan, said MoMA’s populist instincts were on target — an important antidote to the building’s current aesthetic. “It needs that more relaxed, open, less precious quality,” he said.

And he commended MoMA’s use of the folk art site as responsive to a shift among museums toward presenting alternative art forms. “The first order of business is to produce space that’s relevant to the art they’re going to present in this century,” he said.

After a public-relations offensive this week that included detailed briefings for journalists, MoMA officials declined to comment on the reactions on Thursday. Mr. Taniguchi also has not commented on the decision to adjust his building’s design, but MoMA’s director, Glenn D. Lowry, said the architect had been briefed on the plan and had not protested.

“A number of these gestures are gestures he had anticipated,” Mr. Lowry said. “He wants his building to work well.”

Museum officials have said they have not formulated a budget yet for the sweeping redesign of the MoMA complex on West 53rd Street, which is to be completed by 2019. The project has about $5 million in the city’s capital budget, funds that were allocated in fiscal 2012.

Many architects said they feel badly for Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien, whose folk art building was a breakout project that raised the husband-and-wife team’s profile. “It’s devastating to them,” the architect Frank Gehry said. “It’s like tearing down my house in Santa Monica. It’s their kind of beginning.”

“We all loved it when it was done; it was a major piece of architecture on the street,” he added. “I think Billie and Tod deserve a major project in New York City, and let’s get it for them and get on with it. That will get them their dignity back.”

It remains to be seen whether the Diller firm — led by Liz Diller; her husband, Ricardo Scofidio; and Charles Renfro — are held personally accountable for MoMA’s decision. “None of them are responsible for the organization of MoMA that led to making these decisions,” Mr. Gehry said. “It’s not Liz’s fault, it’s not Ric’s fault, it’s not Billie’s fault, it’s not Tod’s fault. Architects work for clients.”

MoMA’s plans include opening its sculpture garden to the public, a decision that is also stirring debate.

“While I think it’s well intentioned to open the garden to the public, the garden since my childhood was an oasis of quiet,” Mr. Stern said.

Now, Mr. Stern added, that sense of calm will be compromised. “It’s lost in the galleries,” he said, “and now I think it’s going to be lost in the garden.”

But Mr. Mayne applauded the decision to open the garden. “It makes it part of the public spaces of New York, and not this private thing,” he said. “It’s not tranquil anymore. It’s a highly dense urban space in the middle of Midtown Manhattan.”

Mr. Mayne was somewhat existential about the whole thing. “All of our work is somewhat ephemeral,” he said.

The architect Richard Meier, whose projects include the Getty Center in Los Angeles, was similarly resigned. “This was a good work, but New York City is ever changing,” he said. “Not everything lasts forever, and sometimes you have to let go.”

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The Museum of Modern Art unveiled on Wednesday a sweeping redesign of its Midtown building, featuring a retractable glass wall, new gallery space and the opening of its entire first floor, including the beloved sculpture garden, free to the public.

It is unclear whether this grand, ambitious plan will be enough to quell protests over a long-contemplated and controversial part of the museum’s overhaul: the razing of its next-door neighbor on West 53rd Street, the noteworthy, if idiosyncratic, former home of the American Folk Art Museum.

MoMA announced in April that it planned to demolish the folk museum, despite the building’s well-regarded designers and its striking bronze facade. After protests from architects, urban planners and preservationists, MoMA officials said they would review that decision.

Related Coverage

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  Critic’s Notebook: Defending a Scrap of Soul Against MoMAMAY 12, 2013

• 

  To Raze or Not? MoMA Rethinks PlanMAY 9, 2013

• 

  12-Year-Old Building at MoMA Is DoomedAPRIL 10, 2013

But museum officials said on Wednesday that keeping the folk museum, built in 2001 and bought by MoMA in 2011, was simply impossible, and they focused on the benefits of the new design that came about during the review.

Launch media viewer

“It’s a very nice gesture of a kind of new ethos: To make publicly accessible, unticketed space that is attractive and has cultural programming,” Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, said.

The architects of the folk museum, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, protested the most recent decision in a statement.

“This action represents a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many,” the architects said. “The inability to experience the building firsthand and to appreciate its meaning from an historical perspective will be profoundly felt.”

MoMA plans to start construction this spring or summer and to finish the project in 2018 or 2019. Despite the plan’s broad scope, the museum said it could not yet provide a budget, making the viability of the redesign hard to measure.

MoMA officials said they would need to raise all the money privately because the museum is not a city-owned institution. “This is now a much bigger project than we had envisioned,” Mr. Lowry said. “We have to figure out how to cost it out.”

The overhaul seeks to address some of the criticisms leveled at the museum since its $858 million overhaul by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi just nine years ago. Common complaints are that the 2004 redesign appears cold and closed off to the general public; its lobby is chaotic and overcrowded; and it takes too long to reach the art.

Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architectural firm hired by MoMA to evaluate whether the shoebox-shaped, 40-foot-wide folk art building could be incorporated into a renovation, said the decision was arrived at after intensive study. The broad plan was presented to some members of the media on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“It’s not for lack of trying that we find ourselves at the same pass,” said Elizabeth Diller, a principal at the firm. “We can’t find a way to save the building.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/arts/design/a-grand-redesign-of-moma-does-not-spare-a-notable-neighbor.html?hp&_r=0

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Jan. 7, 2014 5:52 p.m. ET

'Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn' (1995/2009), by Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei

Washington

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Creative Destruction" @wsj - By Richard B. Woodward      

When visitors step off the escalator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and enter "Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950," they are greeted by towering Kodachrome images of slow-motion explosions. Blooming into flowery clouds, these shots of nuclear tests—excerpts from 1950s films made by the defense contractor Edgerton, Germeshausen & Grier for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—are like a silent ballet for smoke monsters.

Nothing that follows in this smart, provocative show, which is about the dangerous wish to eradicate the past and start anew, can match the hellish beauty of these toxic pictures.

That hasn't stopped curators Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson from filling the outer ring on the second floor with 100 or so works that play with the crunching, fiery theme of violence. All of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, films and performances—by a stellar group of artists from the U.S., Europe and Asia—are about the spectacle of destroying things.

As such acts can arouse contrary reactions, depending on who is doing the destroying, what is being destroyed and why, the show is guaranteed to upset and divide audiences.

Artists have for a long time smashed all sorts of things on purpose. A Yamaha grand piano lies in shambles in the first room. It was recently demolished by Raphael Montañez Ortiz, author of the 1962 Destructivist Manifesto, who has done this more than 80 times since the 1960s for filmed concerts that explore the post-John Cage sonic regions between noise and music. (Rock 'n' roll equipment bashers and feedback freaks who seek high-art credibility can cite Mr. Ortiz as inspiration.)

Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950

Hirshhorn Museum

And Sculpture Garden

Through May 26

The thing destroyed can be someone else's art or one's own. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing to erase. De Kooning reluctantly agreed to the collaboration, but gave the younger artist a work so deeply marked it took Rauschenberg a month to wipe clean. "Erased De Kooning Drawing" shares a room with documents from John Baldessari's cremation of his own pre-1970 oeuvre. He photographed the act, confirmed it in a newspaper notice, and even made cookies from the ashes.

Another kind of whimsy can be found in car-crash photographs from the 1950s to '70s by the Swiss policeman Arnold Odermatt. He focused not on human victims, but on smashed auto bodies as a new, delicate form of sculpture. (His 1965 image of a Volkswagen VOW3.XE +0.07% Volkswagen AG Non-Vtg Pfd. Germany: Xetra ^€200.15 +0.15 +0.07% Jan. 8, 2014 5:35 pm Volume : 470,813 P/E Ratio 11.50 Market Cap€91.14 Billion Dividend Yield 1.78% Rev. per Employee €353,101 20120019919810a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 01/08/14 Mexican Auto Exports Break Yea... 01/08/14 Mexican Auto Production Hit Re... 01/07/14 Brazil Posts First Drop in Aut... More quote details and news » VOW3.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position in an Alpine lake, Hitler's "People's Car" sinking in a Romantic setting, is the catalog cover.)

"Damage Control" brings back forgotten movements, such as Auto-Destructive Art. Its 1961 manifesto, written by Gustav Metzger, a Polish Jew who had fled the Nazis for England, called on artists to harness the forces of nature in order to make public art that would disintegrate in moments or years. ("Not interested in ruins," the manifesto specified.) In a 1963 film he is seen torching a hanging sheet into ashy wisps.

Jean Tinguely, the Swiss Dadaist inventor of clanky, self-immolating machines, is prominent here. An archival find is a 1962 performance, improbably commissioned by NBC, where he is seen prowling Las Vegas junkyards for stuff to blow up in a casino parking lot. The network not only devoted 22 minutes of air time to his actions, but also employed David Brinkley to explain them as a commentary on U.S. consumerism.

The British artist Michael Landy, a fan of Tinguely, used his personal belongings for public spectacle in his audacious piece "Break Down." In 2001 he rented a London shop where visitors could watch over 11 days as a machine he conceived of destroyed everything he owned. The 16-minute video documents the slow compacting and shredding of 7,227 items—books and bedding, art by friends as well as his own art, and finally a coat given to him by his father. The pipe-dream of starting one's life again without any baggage has seldom been so poignantly realized.

Questions about artistic license to destroy grow more vexing in a gallery where three photographs of Ai Weiwei show him dropping and smashing a Han Dynasty urn. This 1995 work is not far from a kindred desecration by Jake and Dinos Chapman, who in 2004 drew in colored pen on Goya's series "The Disasters of War," claiming that their additions "improved" the 80 etchings.

In neither case did the artists rely on reproductions, as many other artists since Marcel Duchamp have done. Mr. Ai irreparably broke a third-century Chinese artifact; and the Chapman brothers have marred a set of rare masterworks.

It's a toss-up which action is more irresponsible. Is Mr. Ai's forgivable because of his dissident status? Or is it less so because the urn is no longer recognizable as a functional object, whereas most areas in Goya's etchings remain untouched by the Chapmans' graffiti? Why do both gestures seem more scandalous than, say, composing a disco version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Is it their arrogance or the permanence of the harm they've done to another's work of art?

The curators go too far in apologizing for artists who trash the past for a giggle. But there's no denying that strains of Modernism (and capitalism) encourage disruption. Futurism was only one movement that believed art could "move forward" only by razing the old order.

Dario Gamboni's catalog essay takes care to distinguish among various individuals or groups that have defaced art in the name of a higher calling. He mentions Mary Richardson, who in 1914 took a meat cleaver to Diego Velázquez's "Rokeby Venus" at the National Gallery in London. (To protest the imprisonment of fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, "the most beautiful character in modern history," Richardson thought it right to destroy "the most beautiful woman in mythological history.") Tony Shafrazi spray painted "KILL LIES ALL" on "Guernica" in 1974, when Pablo Picasso's mural was still at MoMA. (He claimed his actions were an anti-Vietnam War protest and an attempt "to bring the art absolutely up to date" and "give it life.")

Self-righteousness can justify any act of havoc. In 2001 the Afghani Taliban dynamited the Buddhas in Bamiyan, calling them idols of the infidels. In a Byzantine art exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art one can see classical statues that were vandalized in the fourth century by Christians who "improved" Greek and Roman art with incised crucifixes.

Historical cycles of political and religious fervor, though, should not obscure the fact that, when safely consumed, mayhem is a basic food group in the world's entertainment diet. Science-fiction movies pump up their box office numbers with ever more extravagant disasters, as Mr. Brougher writes in his essay.

Watching things explode can be mesmerizing, as in Ori Gersht's "Big Bang I" from 2006, a slow-motion video of a flower vase's shattering. David Letterman used to feature a popular segment in which things were thrown off buildings or crushed by steamrollers, to the delight of his audience. "Mythbusters" often relies on similar small-scale acts of televised havoc.

"Damage Control" brings together artists from different eras who don't usually schedule play dates. Bruce Conner's "A Movie," his 1958 montage of nukes and nudes, turns out to be a distant relative of Douglas Gordon's 2007 "Self Portrait of You + Me" series, portraits of celebrities with faces deformed as if by an atomic blast.

The curators want us to share in the anarchic glee, safely contained by a museum. But behind the fun and games, their expertly installed show also raises difficult-to-answer questions about technology, politics, the role of an avant garde in history, and what we want art and artists to do for us.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann -"A Once-Troubled Museum Frames a Future in Los Angeles" @nytimes by RANDY KENNEDY and CAROL VOGEL

After three years of tumultuous leadership, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles said it was nearing the end of a search for a new director and announced on Monday that it had reached a fund-raising milestone that would ensure it does not have to merge with another institution or face dissolution.

The museum, which has one of the most important collections of postwar art in the country but has struggled financially for years, said it had a combination of “firm commitments” and donations in hand that would raise its endowment to $100 million. The amount, a goal its board members set last year, is by far the highest in the museum’s history.

At its low point in 2008, because of overspending and flagging investments during the recession, the endowment dwindled to only a few million from a high of more than $40 million at the beginning of the decade. The billionaire collector Eli Broad, one of the museum’s founding board members, came to the rescue, donating $15 million and pledging $15 million more to match contributions by others. But the museum struggled to find donors who would allow those matching funds to be used.

The new fund-raising drive — led by wealthy board members like Jeffrey Soros, a nephew of the financier George Soros; Eugenio Lopez, the Mexican art collector; and Maurice Marciano, a founder of the Guess clothing company — will “eliminate any doubt in the public’s mind that we’re not here to stay,” said Maria Seferian, the museum’s interim director.

Twice in the past six years, the museum’s troubles became so acute that proposals were floated to merge it with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, its larger neighbor to the west. At the urging of Mr. Broad, the museum also explored an agreement last year with the National Gallery of Art in Washington that would have involved collaborations on programming and research but not a merger.

As the museum looks ahead to try to stabilize itself, Maria Arena Bell, who is stepping down after the end of her term as a co-chairwoman of the museum’s board, said in an interview Monday that there were “absolutely no plans” being discussed by the board for the museum to share curatorial, administrative or any other significant resources with the Broad, the private contemporary art museum that Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, plan to open next year almost directly across the street from the main site of the Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. While the two museums might collaborate on marketing strategies and have a “very friendly relationship,” she said, they will remain separate entities. Ms. Bell added that there were no strings attached to any of the donations or pledges that would require the museum to join forces in any way with the Broads’ museum.

Even as it began to shore up its finances recently, the museum endured three rocky years under the leadership of Jeffrey Deitch, a veteran New York art dealer whose selection as the museum’s director in 2010 was highly unconventional. While his tenure included a few well-attended, critically praised exhibitions, it suffered from staff defections, budget problems and the departure of all four artists on the museum’s board; the artists complained that Mr. Deitch was taking the museum too far away from serious shows and toward celebrity, fashion and pop culture. After Mr. Deitch resigned in 2013, during the third year of a five-year contract, the four artists — John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha — joined the search committee for a director. (Mr. Deitch said on Monday that he was “looking for a large space in New York where I can present ambitious projects.”)

David G. Johnson, the museum’s other co-chairman, who is also stepping down after many years on the board, said that none of the donations or pledges for the endowment were contingent upon Mr. Deitch’s leaving. He added that the museum remained “committed to continuing both a program of diverse artists and diverse audiences.”

But in its search for the next director, Mr. Johnson, Ms. Seferian and Ms. Bell added that the candidates considered have been museum professionals, not figures from the commercial art world or from other nonprofit institutions. A director will probably be chosen in the next few weeks, the officials said.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

A Legendary Dealer’s Eagle Eye

‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ at MoMA

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

‘Ambassador for the New’: A look at a new exhibition at MoMA that highlights the career of the gallery owner and art collector Ileana Sonnabend.

 By HOLLAND COTTER

If you think that all art exhibitions result from the natural meeting of laudable subjects and curatorial passion, consider “Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New,” which opens on Saturday at the Museum of Modern Art. Although the subject is a worthy one — Sonnabend was among the most foresighted art dealers of the late 20th century — the show is a byproduct of legal hassles and diplomatic campaigns surrounding her billion-dollar estate, which may be one reason it feels, as a tribute, cool and impersonal, a portrait-in-art that is only a sketch.

The art is certainly impressive, a constellation of icons, with Sonnabend’s eye and energy the gravitational force. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Romania in 1914, she married a future art dealer, Leo Castelli, born Leo Krausz, in 1932. During World War II, they and their young daughter, Nina, fled Europe for New York, where Castelli opened a gallery.

Artwise, they made a good pair. Although very different in demeanor and temperament — Castelli was debonair and talkative, Sonnabend stolid and shy — they shared an appetite for the untried and the difficult, with Sonnabend, in the long run, having the more adventurous eye. Together, in 1957 they made a famous exploratory trip to Robert Rauschenberg’s studio, where they met Jasper Johns. Sonnabend bought a Johns painting on the spot and became Rauschenberg’s avid and lasting advocate.

After she and Castelli divorced in 1959, Sonnabend remarried, moved to Paris and opened a gallery of her own. She introduced American artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Rauschenberg to Europe, helping, long-distance, to position New York as the new art capital. When she moved back to Manhattan in 1968 and set up business in SoHo, she pulled traffic in the other direction, drawing avant-garde European art from across the Atlantic. She sustained this cosmopolitan mix for five decades, and stayed interested in new art until her death at 92 in 2007. The MoMA show, organized by Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and Claire Lehmann, a curatorial assistant, is a sampler of some 40 objects covering that span, all owned by Sonnabend at one time. Rauschenberg’s monumental 1959 assemblage or “combine” titled “Canyon” has pride of place just inside the gallery entrance, and for good reason. It was Sonnabend’s favorite among the thousands of objects she acquired. It was a much-reported MoMA acquisition in 2012. And it’s still a startler.

Its central element, a taxidermied bald eagle, spread-winged and with a trussed pillow dangling from its claws, conjoins an American emblem with a reference to the Greek myth in which Zeus, in the form of a bird, abducts a boy he lusts after. A collaged photograph of the artist’s young son and the combine’s general air of chaotic dereliction add an intensely subversive spin to the notion of “American” art.

The chaotic look of the piece aroused indignation among some of its initial viewers, which was to Sonnabend always a sign of success. She hit that jackpot repeatedly. Europeans grumbled over Jasper Johns’s work, which was her debut presentation in Paris, and over Andy Warhol’s two years later. A piece by Mr. Johns, “Device,” from that first show, is in the MoMA show. So is one of Warhol’s spectacular “Death and Disaster” pictures, with repeated images of a suicide shuddering across the canvas. (Although shipped, this painting didn’t end up in Warhol’s Paris show because it was too big to fit in the gallery.)

She brought more Pop from New York — James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann — but by the mid- to late-1960s her interests had moved on to American Minimalism, evident here in a majestic Robert Morris sculpture in draped industrial felt. At the same time, she was captivated by a European near-equivalent, Arte Povera, distinguished by a grounding in radical politics and by a poetic use of materials, as in an untitled Giovanni Anselmo sculpture made from carved granite and fresh lettuce.

She exhibited and collected photography at a time when many people didn’t accept the medium as art. And she challenged those who did by promoting hard-to-love work, like the mid-1960s “portraits” of German industrial architecture taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher. She gave fledgling media like video and performance an early berth.

It’s safe to say that Vito Acconci’s notorious 1972 performance, “Seedbed,” for which the artist masturbated, invisibly but audibly, for hours, under a gallery floor, would not have been welcome at many other SoHo spaces, including, one suspects, the Castelli Gallery. When Sonnabend found an artist interesting, she let him (her roster was almost entirely male) do what he wanted, no questions asked.

Her final commitment to something like a movement came in the 1980s when she took on young American artists like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, who cribbed from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism and who, in ways that make even more sense now, were gripped by a love-hate infatuation with the market. Classic pieces by all three are here.

When I say classic, I mean typical pieces, but I also mean widely seen and often reproduced. Given the thousands of objects that passed through Sonnabend’s hands over five decades, and the rich store of them that became her collection, the objects chosen for the MoMA exhibition are surprisingly unsurprising. With few exceptions — a 1962 Jim Dine “tool” painting, a 1972 Jannis Kounellis text piece — they’re familiar, and in the case of “Canyon,” a textbook staple.

“Canyon” plays a major role here. The show revolves around it in a very basic way. Because it incorporates the remains of a bald eagle, an endangered species, the work could not be sold. When Sonnabend died and her collection was appraised for tax purposes, her heirs — her daughter, Nina Sundell, and her adopted son, Antonio Homem — valued the unmarketable “Canyon” at zero; the Internal Revenue Service, however, estimated that it was worth $65 million and was prepared to tax the estate accordingly.

A deal was struck. If the piece was donated to a museum, the estate tax on it would be dropped. Both the Met and MoMA badly wanted it, and Sonnabend’s heirs made conditions for a gift.

The receiving institution would be required to mount an exhibition in Sonnabend’s honor and inscribe her name in the museum’s list of founding donors. In the end, Ms. Sundell and Mr. Homem deemed MoMA, which owns five Rauschenberg combines, the more appropriate setting.

Ms. Sonnabend’s name is now dutifully listed among the founders in the museum’s lobby.

Dutiful is also how the tribute exhibition feels, and cautious. MoMA is clearly concerned about perceptions of impropriety, the taint of commerce. Sonnabend Gallery is still in business; what remains of the collection (portions have already been sold) could go on the block at any time. Apparently to avoid the impression that the MoMA exhibition might serve as a sales show, the curators have surrounded “Canyon” mostly with work already in museum collections, including its own.

Such caution is wise, but in this instance it also prevents a subject from getting its full due. Sonnabend’s is an important story, not only because of the range of art she embraced, but because she lived in an era when few women were doing what she did.

MoMA presents her monumentally as a tastemaker and canon-shaper, but leaves out all the constructive matter, the human complications, a sense of misses along with hits: in short, context of a kind revealed in letters, informal photographs and contemporary documents. Such material is essential to any truly historical — which inevitably means personal — show. Sonnabend, quiet but deep and prescient, deserves that kind of accounting.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Art-Scene Glimpses, Lost Then Found

Vito Acconci, right, on Pier 18 in 1971, part of a trove of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender photos the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is donating to five art institutions.

Shunk-Kender / Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

December 18, 2013

The black-and-white images from the 1960s immediately evoke an era of experimentation and ebullience on the art scene: Andy Warhol clutching a bouquet at a gallery opening; Yayoi Kusama lying on a sculptural love seat at the height of her first American fame; naked women covered in blue paint rolling on paper to create an image for Yves Klein, while musicians play in the background.

These photographs are among the highlights in an enormous trove of more than 200,000 prints, negatives and other photographic material that the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is donating to five top art institutions. The gift, which the foundation will announce on Thursday, documents some of the art world’s most influential — and ephemeral — artistic achievements of the mid-20th century.

The gift of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Photography Collection, estimated to be worth around $25 million, is being split among the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Tate in Britain; and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

The photographs were shot by two eccentric characters, Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, largely from 1958 to 1973, and they capture an indelible era centered on the avant-garde world in New York and Paris. Art was often made communally, and spontaneously, and those the photographers caught in the act of creating it include Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Eva Hesse, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and some 400 other artists.

Slide Show | The Shunk-Kender Archive An art foundation is giving away 200,000 images from one of the great archives of photography documenting 20th-century artists.

The German-born Shunk (1924-2006) and the Hungarian-born Kender (1937-2009) were hired as a team by artists and dealers to record events from routine gallery openings to major conceptual happenings. They shot on the fly and frequently at the same time, never identifying photos as by one or the other.

The collection’s spirit — recording art making that looked a lot like play — is epitomized by Shunk-Kender’s 1961 image of a gun-toting and paint-splattered Niki de Saint Phalle taking aim for one of her “rifle-shot” works, in which fractured bags of paint created the image.

Roxana Marcoci, senior curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called the Shunk-Kender images “an extraordinary, absolutely amazing archive.” MoMA has already received 638 vintage prints; among the most valuable of those is a near-complete set of images from a 1971 performance project on Pier 18. Among the works: the artist Vito Acconci, blindfolded, being led to the edge of the pier, and William Wegman’s contribution, a bowling ball rolling toward pins.

The prints fill an important gap in the Modern’s collection, Ms. Marcoci said, “the history of how photography documented performance art from the 1950s to the 1970s.”

They collaborated with Yves Klein on “Leap Into the Void” (1960), a photomontage of him doing a swan dive.

When the two photographers parted ways, in 1973, Kender gave Shunk control of the material they worked on together, and Shunk continued photographing for another 30 years; some of his solo work is also included in the gift.

For years, the entire archive was moldering in Shunk’s hoarder-style West Village apartment in the Westbeth artists’ housing complex, directly across the street from the Lichtenstein Foundation. Toward the end of Shunk’s life, foundation staff members were aware that he was a neighbor, but they had no idea of the extent of his holdings.

When Shunk died, in 2006, the photographs were carted off by the New York public administrator, and the estate was appraised. Dorothy Lichtenstein, widow of Roy and the foundation’s president, and Jack Cowart, its executive director, discovered its existence from the appraiser, with whom they had worked before. They stepped in and made a bid at the public auction, thinking they would be outbid by a museum.

“We hoped to be Plan B,” Mr. Cowart said, adding that it was important that the archive not be dispersed. Once acquired (the foundation made later, much smaller purchases of Shunk-Kender images from other sources), it became a consuming project to organize and whip the material into shape. The foundation also created a free online archive.

“This mother lode of art-historical data needed to be made available to everyone,” Mr. Cowart said. The Lichtenstein Foundation has divided the collection based on institutional strengths and curator requests, and in an unusual move, the five institutions will allow one another unfettered access to all parts of the gift. Mr. Cowart described the somewhat “subversive” sharing arrangement as “membership in a club.”

Glenn Phillips, acting head of the department of architecture and contemporary art at the Getty Research Institute, said, “This archival sharing is not so common, but the Shunk archive is the perfect candidate to try something like that.” The Getty is receiving the bulk of the gift, some 183,000 items, as well as management of the copyright on all the images, because of its ability to care for huge amounts of archival material.

The National Gallery of Art will receive around 2,300 images documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their epic installation works. They are the most heavily represented artists in the archive. (Klein is the runner-up.)

The Pompidou Center will receive 10,000 prints, and the Tate’s final number has yet to be worked out. The Lichtenstein Foundation intends to have an entire set of the most important images available in Europe split between the two museums, so that scholars and curators there will have easy access. Shunk’s disorganized archive was almost lost to history when the foundation rescued it in 2008, despite the minimal presence of Roy Lichtenstein in the reams of photographs.

The acquisition and donation were the brainchild of Mr. Cowart — and of Ms. Lichtenstein, who personally donated $2 million to acquire the works.

“Our charter purpose is to facilitate public access to the work of Roy Lichtenstein, as well as the art and artists of his time,” Mr. Cowart said “We had been musing how we would implement that last part,” he added. “All of a sudden, this dropped in our lap.”

The foundation devoted years to organizing, cataloging and digitizing the material. Mr. Phillips of the Getty said, “A huge amount of the work we usually need to do on a collection like this has already been done.”

The foundation will hold on to some 25,000 Shunk-Kender works after the distribution and said it is likely to make more gifts.

As Mr. Cowart put it, “We feel very bonded to this project.”

Correction: December 18, 2013

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of the artist featured in the image. He is Vito Acconci, not Annonci.

George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal - "A Complexity That Trumps Similarities" @nytimes By ROBERTA SMITH

A Complexity That Trumps Similarities

Call and response: Martin Creed’s toilet-paper pyramid at Hauser & Wirth, above, parallels a cinder-block one at Gavin Brown.

Genevieve Hanson / Hauser & Wirth New York

By ROBERTA SMITH

December 17, 2013

Sometimes I think the British artist-musician Martin Creed makes art for dummies, not excluding myself. At the same time, his accumulations and arrangements of everyday objects and materials initially seem so rudimentary and forthright that they can also make you feel smart.

The dumb-smart continuum is very much in play in Mr. Creed’s concurrent shows at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the West Village and the uptown gallery of Hauser & Wirth. On this occasion he has made art from such mundane items as bricks, I-beams, colored yarn, rolls of toilet paper and light bulbs, rarely using more than one material or kind of object per work. Together these exhibitions provide an unusually complete picture of his subversive wit and rather restrained, almost classic sense of beauty, not least because he uses the two locations for call-and-response exchanges.

For example, the final work at Hauser & Wirth is a large pyramid of stacked rolls of white toilet paper that is surprisingly eye-popping. (It helps that the cardboard tubes read as black spots.) The first piece at Gavin Brown is its exact opposite, a pyramid made of cinder blocks. The works serve as each other’s punch lines in addition to being the largest possible pyramids that either space could accommodate. They also quietly spoof the big expensive artworks that typically fill New York’s large galleries. A similar sendup — in this case, of installation art as architectural intervention — is a large black balloon shape painted on a wall at Hauser & Wirth that at first looks startlingly like an actual hole.

Mr. Creed, who was born in 1968 and has exhibited in New York since 1997, has devised one of today’s more literal-minded hybrids of Minimalism and Conceptualism. His pieces achieve an unusual balance of materials and ideas, partly because thought is emphasized over traditional skill. Yet the complexity and artistic potential of the physical world is a constant theme.

Martin Creed His light-bulb installation at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, one of two shows in Manhattan devoted to the artist.

Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

At Hauser & Wirth, the six widely available sizes of steel I-beams, each cut to a length equal to its height, are stacked, perpendicular to a wall like a staircase, splitting the difference between sculpture and architecture while taking up almost no space. There are more stacked I-beam pieces at Brown, including one that seems to penetrate a wall, another optical illusion. Next to this work is a wall installation made from every type of white light bulb produced by one company: 49 in all, screwed into electrical sockets set flush with the wall in a grid formation. The distinctly different bulbs disrupt the repetition expected of grids while creating a unified glow.

A similar affirmation of individuality, but far more emotionally charged, unfolds in a new video that shows about a dozen people with atypical gaits crossing the street just outside Mr. Brown’s gallery, one at a time. Some are clearly managing without their usual aids, be it a cane, crutch or wheelchair. But one way or another, they all make it across — moving, it seems, in rhythm to the sounds of a loud, cheerful rock song written and performed by Mr. Creed. In addition to uniqueness, fortitude is succinctly demonstrated in addition to uniqueness.

Human individuality and the challenge of capturing it may be an increasing focus for Mr. Creed, who is pursuing traditional mediums with a new zeal, as evidenced by a series of drawn and painted portraits in which conventional aesthetic decision-making has been deliberately thwarted.

These works invariably look a little odd, haphazardly expressionistic or even childish. Mr. Creed clearly made some of them with his eyes closed, including two pencil drawings that resemble skewed wire portraits by Alexander Calder. Others suggest that he was working from memory, without the model. A particularly messy one placed high on the wall, “Jumping up Portrait of Luciana,” leaves little doubt that each stroke was applied by the artist in midair.

Perhaps to prove that he has the requisite artistic skills after all, Mr. Creed has included a small, dark, relatively descriptive self-portrait. In its way, this drawing may spoof the idea of the artist as expressionist madman, or everything Mr. Creed is not.

Martin Creed’s work is on view through Saturday at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village; 212- 627-5258, gavinbrown.biz/home.html; and at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, Manhattan; 212-794-4970, hauserwirth.com.

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