Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by the history of art, by apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive mediums, live performance, and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, such art embodies a longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past.

Christian Boltanski
Autel de Lycee Chases, 1986-87

From March 26 to September 6, 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, an exhibition that documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice. Drawn largely from the Guggenheim’s extensive photography and video collections, Haunted features some 100 works by nearly 60 artists, including many recent acquisitions that will be on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition is installed throughout the rotunda and its spiraling ramps, with two additional galleries on view from June 4 to September 1, featuring works by two pairs of artists to complete Haunted’s presentation.

Joan Jonas
Mirror Piece, 1969

Artists: Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Paul Chan, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Joan Jonas, Sally Mann, Christian Marclay, Susan Philipsz, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner, as Well as Commissioned Performances by Sharon Hayes, Joan Jonas, and Tris Vonna-Michell

Marina Abramovic
Cleaning the Mirror #1, 1995

For many, today’s world is marked by anxiety and doubt precipitated by events beyond our control. This unease is a natural response to a tumultuous and troubling decade filled with natural disasters, war, global terrorism, and worldwide financial collapse.

Artists have always reflected and reacted to the world around them—and contemporary art, through its form or content, often disturbs as much as it provides solace. In DISQUIETED, a roster of renowned contemporary artists explore our social condition and respond to the most compelling issues of the day, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times.

The works—including paintings, photography, sculptures, and video installations—evoke an instant reaction. Whether unsettling or benign, all require a second look. The issues presented are both intimate and global, prompting viewers to consider their own humanity and their place in the world.

The artists presented in this exhibition are among today’s foremost figures in contemporary art; most have never been exhibited in Portland. Artists featured in the exhibition include: Gregory Crewdson, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, and Bill Viola among others.

ABOVE:
Sanford Biggers
Biggers’ Cheshire
Wall/floor sculpture with a LED light show
(2008)

Artists have long been fascinated by the methods used in seducing customers, and by the locales of shopping – from corner shops and department stores to contemporary suburban mega-malls. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture examines the relationship between the display, distribution and consumption of commodities and modern and contemporary art, and includes works that blur the distinction between the shop environment and the gallery environment.

Andreas Gursky
99 Cent II, 2001 (diptych)

Andreas Gursky’s new work 99 Cent II 2001 celebrates and critiques the seductive powers of supermarket packaging and presentation.

A collaboration between the great names of Pop art, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, The American Supermarket is an evocation of an ordinary supermarket but one where real foods such as Warhol’s signed stacks of Campbell’s soup cans are mixed together with works such as Robert Watts’ chrome fruits and multicoloured wax eggs.

Robert M.Watts, Eggs
The American Supermarket, 1964
Shopping also presents a classic example of Christo’s covered store fronts from the 1960s, an ensemble of Jeff Koons’ monumental vacuum-cleaner vitrines from the 1980s, and Barbara Kruger’s iconic work Untitled (I shop therefore I am) 1987.

Barbara Kruger
Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987

Damien Hirst
Pharmacy 1992

This piece explores the link between the presentation techniques used by pharmaceutical companies and the methods of display found in shops and museums.

On 27 March 2010 the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location “The Globe
Shrinks”, a new video installation by Barbara Kruger.

“The Globe Shrinks” (2010) is a multiple channel video installation that continues
Kruger’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of
declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address,
and the unspoken in every conversation.

Barbara Kruger
still from The Globe Shrinks
dimensions variable
four-screen digital video installation
2010

Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was. At least, that’s the way it looks in “The Globe Shrinks,” an immersive new multichannel video installation that is challenging the presumptions of all who dare to enter the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea.

Balancing self-possession with self-doubt and rage with tenderness, Kruger’s art does exactly what one of her subtitles says: it show us to ourselves. The globe may shrink for those who own it, as another phrase (borrowed from the critical theorist Homi K. Bhaba) puts it, but Kruger’s perfect calibration of life’s crueler ironies performs a kind of miracle, allowing the blind to see all.

This is the third of a series of video works with which Kruger has translated her widely copied graphic designs — superimposing red or white text over cropped images, or enlarging words into slogans the size of buildings — into propulsive action. Some of the text in “The Globe Shrinks” came out of “Between Being and Dying,” her installation last fall at Lever House, where she covered the windows, columns and floor of the lobby in phrases like “A rich man’s jokes are always funny,” speaking truth to the lords of power and ambition who build palaces like, well, Lever House.

www.maryboonegallery.com
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151