May 19 – June 25, 2022

May 13 – June 25, 2022

Including the return of Jordan Peele and Thor

A surprising source of radical art

How technology can help uncover art's mysteries

How a taboo-busting duet became a hit and broke new ground

The hedonistic thrill of America's Fire Island

How does the portrayal of 'The King' in Baz Luhrmann's film compare to reality?

How Full Metal Jacket revealed 'the mindlessness of conflict'

How Cornelia Parker uses explosives, steamrollers and snake venom in her work

How the dubious aesthetic of Kubrick's film has endured in pop culture

6 min read

Oxford’s architectural styles through time

Oxford has many architectural wonders. These world-famous buildings range from medieval towers to modern university sites, showcasing changing styles from Classical to Modern. In this blog I focus on a selection of buildings to give an insight into the multitude of architectural styles in the city.

Twelfth century: Christ Church Cathedral

Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, in his poem ‘Thyrsis’ described Oxford as ‘the city of dreaming spires’. Christ Church Cathedral, with its distinctive tower, exemplifies this idea. The spire has a pyramidal shape accented by four gabled, lucarne (dormer) windows and pinnacles at each corner of the square base. It follows the architectural style of the Romanesque and Gothic, the most characteristic styles associated with Oxford university.

On the exterior are layers of blind arcading with rounded and pointed arches, typical of Romanesque and Gothic architecture respectively, as well as crenellated walls and buttressing. A large rose window divided into ten parts dominates the wall behind the altar and, along with the masses of stained glass windows, allows beautiful, saturated light into the cathedral. The interior feels immensely grand with large pier supports that allow the building to rise to great heights, joining at the top in the form of an intricate lierne vault.

The cathedral we see today is a small part of the original building from the twelfth century. It is what remained when a reformed Tom quad was built between 1525 and 1529, and the cathedral was absorbed into Henry VIII’s new Christ Church College. The nave, choir, main tower and transepts are late Norman, though gothic features are present. and The rich lierne vault was added in the 1500s, designed by William Orchard with a dozen pendants linked by ribs that together form eight-pointed star shapes.

Few of the artists in documenta 15 have savior complexes. Formally speaking, a lot of their work resembles social practice and relational aesthetics, two styles associated with the aughts in which art exists not as objects but as interpersonal exchanges. These absent complexesare key distinctions from predecessors, and they are primarily avoided because the projects on view are mostly made by members of the communities they are also for, lending them a horizontal, rather than charitable bent. But there’s another reason—it’s the palpable sense that the world will end soon anyway, so attempting to save it would be downright silly. Instead of a nihilistic dead end, though, the artists and collectives present are practicing care and nurturing the smaller worlds—or rather, communities—that surround them, and appreciating the good that’s left. The work is not moralizing or didactic; instead, it’s born from resourcefulness and community. (There are a few exceptions in the form of proposed blockchain solutions, though those were surprisingly—and mercifully—few and far between given the show’s concern with horizontal resource sharing.)

The end felt nigh in a timeline that ruangrupa put together in the basement of ruruHaus, one of this edition’s main venues, to explain their curatorial process. Their story is punctuated by a slew of catastrophes that disrupted their work—a global pandemic, a war in Ukraine, a bombing in Gaza, and shootings in Hanau, plus visa issues, visa issues, and more visa issues. I felt it too when I saw a hand-painted sign repeated a few times on Kassel’s east side. It reads CONTEMPORARY ART HAS BECOME OUTDATED. THE FLORAISSANCE HAS BEGUN! I don’t know if it was officially part of the quinquennial, or if it will still be there later on, but the sign was a pithy summary of what I wrote yesterday about artists building gardens and leaving society.

The show is invested in resource sharing among humans, but it also abounds with interspecies exchanges. Any urge to preserve human civilization, or to revere art as our species’ highest creative form, feels unsatisfying. Just let the plants take over.

This sort of eco-economy is visible in a series of installations by Jatiwangi art Factory, on view at Hübner areal, which centers around the clay industry in the West Javan province of Jatiwangi, home to Southeast Asia’s roof tile industry. The collective has been cultivating a new clay culture in the city, teaching skills and methods that are meant to be regenerative rather than extractive. They are encouraging workers to extract clay from soil with creativity, dignity, and respect. A ceramic workshop and a video documenting some of the collective’s past efforts were on view. But as in the rest of the quinquennial, workshops were not activated during the professional days. Some colleagues mentioned frantically changing travel plans in the hopes of seeing some of the works as they were really meant to be seen, but it seemed clear that critics and curators were not the target audience.

Modern history has most often been written through the Western gaze and, with that power, comes the ability to control and shape narratives.

For Africans specifically, this gaze has distorted perceptions of the continent’s diverse historical experiences and failed to properly reflect Africans’ true stories. A new generation of Africans, however, are taking ownership of their countries’ histories and, in effect, helping reclaim their narratives.

Rita Mawuena Benissan, a Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist, has been at the forefront of this drive. In 2020, Benissan founded Si Hene, an award-winning non-profit foundation collecting and preserving archives telling stories about Ghana’s chieftaincy and traditional culture, creating awareness around its royal history, and making it accessible globally via digital media.

The nonprofit’s name means “Enstoolment” in Ghana’s Akan language, referring to the process of raising a chief to power in many African ethnic groups.

Benissan’s work has been exhibited at the 2022 La Biennale De Dakar, 2021 Afrochella Festival, and EFIE: Museum as Home, a group museum exhibition at Dortmund U in Germany in 2021.

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The Headlines

CALENDAR CONFIRMATION. The new New York fair from Independent, which will focus on 20th-century art, was just announced in May, but it already has an exhibitor list, and it is 31 galleries strong, Maximilíano Durón reports in ARTnews. Independent 20th Century, as the venture is called, will land at the Battery Maritime Building at the southern tip of Manhattan in early September as the Armory Show runs in Midtown. The galleries taking part include Corbett vs. Dempsey of Chicago, Garth Greenan of New York, and Parker Gallery of Los Angeles. About half of them will be doing an Independent fair for the first time. For more on the event, head to ARTnews.

MARKET MOVEMENT. It not just at Art Basel where artworks are selling for substantial sums, defying the downturn in the equities markets: On Thursday, Heritage Auctions sold the cover art of the first issue of the vaunted miniseries Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) for a cool $2.4 million, the New York Times reports. Created by Frank Miller , it is the latest in a number of comic piece to sell for seven figures in recent years, as the paper details. Meanwhile, the market for female Old Masters has been heating up in recent years, the Financial Times reports. “I think everyone, museums and private collectors alike, took a step back and thought about their collections and realized how important it was to make sure they had a diverse collection,” Calvine Harvey, of Sotheby’s, told the paper.

The Digest

Federal charges have been filed against a 71-year-old man for allegedly illegally excavating Native American artifacts near Tightwad, Missouri, over the course of five years, causing extensive damage. The man’s lawyers have not commented. [The Washington Post]

Good news for Walter De Maria fans: Two of his key installations in Manhattan, The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), are closing for temporary renovations that will allow them to stay open all year round. (They currently shutter for the summer.) [The Art Newspaper]

Independent, which organizes an annual art fair each spring in New York, has announced the 31 galleries that will participate in its new 20th-century art focused fair, set to have its inaugural edition in September at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan.

Among the exhibitors lined up to take part in Independent 20th Century, which will run September 8–11 and coincide with the Armory Show, are Cheim & Read, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Garth Greenan Gallery, Karma, Parker Gallery, and Venus Over Manhattan. This edition will also see 15 galleries participate for the first time in any iteration of Independent ever, including Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, James Fuentes, Susan Inglett Gallery, Nahmad Contemporary, and Shin Gallery.

All of the exhibitors will present work by artists from the 20th-century whose practices have historically been overlooked or under-recognized, matching a tendency that has been rising in the art world over the past decade, including at museums and international biennials such as this year’s Venice Biennale.

Though Independent 20th Century will operate as a commercial art fair, not all the works on view will be for sale, as some will come as loans from private collections.

In an email to ARTnews, Matthew Higgs, the director of New York’s White Columns who is organizing the fair with Independent’s director Elizabeth Dee, said, “Over the past 20 years we have seen the increased presence of historical bodies of work within exhibitions of contemporary art. In the past large-scale exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale focused almost exclusively on the art of the present, whereas almost 50 percent of the artists in the current edition might be described as ‘historical.’ This tendency—i.e. the framing of the ‘contemporary’ through the lens of the past—is arguably the dominant curatorial narrative of this century.”

Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the Swiss watch company’s art-focused arm, has commissioned artist Andreas Angelidakis to create a monumental artwork that will pay homage to ancient Greek culture.

Titled the Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity, the new work will be situated inside the Espace Niemeyer, a dome-like structure in Paris that was designed by the Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer.

The piece’s 19-day run will kick off on October 11, and will be viewable during the first edition of Art Basel’s Paris fair.

Angelidakis, who is based in Athens, will look to his home country’s distant past and attempt to bridge it with the present with his new work, which will fill the Espace Niemeyer with sculptures, paintings, and collages. It is loosely based on the Temple of Olympian Zeus, an Athens structure that predates the Espace Niemeyer by more than two centuries.

The artist was trained as an architect and, in his own description, is now an “architect who doesn’t build.” He frequently considers places and their history, often connecting them to ancient Greece. For the Athens portion of Documenta 14 in 2017, for example, he created works composed of seating modules whose names referred to the Greek words for community and the daemon representing war.

Italy has established a new museum in Rome dedicated to showcasing more than 200 artifacts that are believed to have been stolen from cultural sites across the country and trafficked in the US.

211 of the artifacts, the majority of the 260 that make up the new museum’s rotating collection, were recovered during seizures led by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which estimates the value of the grouping of recovered artifacts to be worth around $10 million.

The newly-minted institution, “Museum of Rescued Art,” is housed in the complex of the National Roman Museum that is home to the ancient city’s 306 C.E. Baths of Diocletian. The 260 artifacts, ranging from Etruscan, Greek and Roman origins, which are still being returned in batches to the Italian government, have gone on display as part of the new enterprise’s first exhibit. Some of the objects were recovered from private collections, museums, and auction houses.

Inaugurating the museum’s Octagonal Hall exhibition space on Wednesday in an official ceremony was Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, Carabinieri commander Teo Luzi, and Massimo Osanna, director of Italy’s state museums. In a press conference, Franceschini described the objects populating the new space as having an “intangible value” linked to Italy’s “historical memory.” Many of them, he said, had never been viewed in public before.

Matthew Bogdanos, the Manhattan assistant district attorney who has since 2017 been in charge of overseeing the department’s cultural property seizures and works closely with the Carabinieri, told ARTnews the New York unit is “humbled that these repatriated antiquities can be on display for the public back in their country of origin.”

Damien Hirst, who rose to fame in the ’90s as the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists, is best known for shocking audiences with his art—from dead animals suspended in formaldehyde to floating basketballs to collections of pills—and the high price tags that have now come to accompany his works.

Hirst’s first came to prominence with his inclusion in the controversial 1988 exhibition “Freeze” that brought together several YBA artists; the show was staged while Hirst was still a student at London’s Goldsmiths College. Utilizing low-brow found objects with an entrepreneurial spirit, the YBAs exemplified a shift in what could be considered art, one that was accompanied by considerable criticism and outrage as to their art’s merit.

Hirst’s own work often centers on issues like death and systems of belief and value, in particular, focusing on the power of the art market. In September 2008, on the brink of the Great Recession, Hirst notoriously sold a body of new work at Sotheby’s, bringing in £70.5 million (around $127 million at the time) and skipping the art world’s gallery system, which would typically handle the first sales of new work. Some have argued that this ended his run “as an art-market darling,” but presently Hirst is represented by major galleries like Gagosian and White Cube. Add to this Hirst’s reputation as the U.K’s richest artist, who has amassed a serious collection of contemporary art that landed him on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list each year between 2008 and 2014.

In the years since, controversy has continued to follow Hirst, from designing the penthouse suite at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas in 2019 filled with his greatest hits to recent reports that his infamous diamond skull allegedly didn’t actually sell in 2007 for $100 million. His history of following the money has recently extended into his first foray into NFTs last summer. “The Currency,” a digital collection that riffs on his series of “spot” paintings, which are visually similar to the NFTs, gave buyers the option to decide between a physical painting or an NFT. In an added flair of drama, the piece not chosen would subsequently be burned.

But he is not only focused on the NFT market: his recent real-life exhibition, “Forgiving and Forgetting” at Gagosian’s 24th Street location was his first show in New York in four years. That show opened in January and was later extended until April 16. Through it all, Hirst has succeeded in keeping his name at the top of our minds.

The weather in Kassel was gorgeous today, and I spent a lot of time taking in Documenta’s abundant outdoor offerings. Many of them involved living plants, including a greenhouse by the Colombian collective Más Arte Más Acción (MAMA), a compost heap by La Intermundial Holobiente, Nhà Sàn Collective’s Vietnamese garden, and mosquito net-based structures by Cinema Caravan and Takashi Kuribayashi.

ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective behind this year’s edition of documenta, writes that they do not conceive of Kassel as an exhibition venue, but rather, an ecosystem. But this mentality not only informs installations in parks—a chatty barista at a documenta-approved coffee cart told me that, to be an on-site vender, they had to sign an agreement with the organization saying they’d source everything locally and ethically.

Yesterday, I wrote that the white cube context felt sort of irrelevant to the show. Today, I hardly went in any buildings. I found myself more impressed—and more tired. The day felt something like a scavenger hunt, and to see La Intermundial Holobiente’s compost heap alone, I walked an hour roundtrip.

I was struck by the Nest Collective’s Return to Sender, which featured giant bundles of the e-waste that often ends up on the African continent. Placed prominently in a park, the work didn’t attempt to expose a shocking truth. It didn’t have to, either—we all know we live on a trash planet, and that the effects of this reality are experienced unequally. The work was accompanied by a video in which residents in Nairobi, the city where the Nest Collective is based, discuss their relationship to secondhand clothes, which are abundant in the city and often imported from the Global North. They talked about the challenge of crafting their own unique styles and identities with these materials. The work is indicative of a recent trend in which artists position themselves as figures who might help us wade through the trash and industrial materials we are slowly drowning in.