More patriarch than dictator

Burchard makes the insightful observation that Charles Le Brun’s
designs function as frontispieces to the places and monuments that celebrate Louis XIV’s reign. This idea is supported by the artist’s reuse of an allegorical composition for a lost painted portrait of the king in an engraved frontispiece to a philosophical treatise

Charles Le Brun—the subject of Wolf Burchard’s beautifully presented book—had the rare combination of skill and social grace required to succeed in the faction-ridden, bureaucratic climate of Louis XIV’s court. He worked for the king nearly half his life, entering Louis XIV’s service in 1661 at the age of 42 and working for him until he died at 71 in 1690. His preeminent position among the Sun King’s artists is evident from the many offices that he held: he was the king’s premier peintre; chancellor, rector and later director of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture; and director of the Gobelins manufactory where paintings, tapestries and furniture were made for the royal palaces. With three decades of service to the crown, Le Brun’s indelible mark on the history of art is most evident at Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, where his grand, ebullient style is found everywhere in paintings that he made and the many objects and images produced after his designs by others.

Those of us who study the art of ancien régime France, especially that produced for aristocrats before the 1789 revolution, face the burden of reconciling a fascinating, beautiful world with its terrible politics. For some, this task proved to be impossible. The British art historian, Anthony Blunt, equated Charles Le Brun’s leading role in the design and production of Louis XIV’s palaces, gardens, monuments and all that they contained with the top-down tyrannical structure of absolutist government, branding him “a dictator of the arts in France”. Blunt’s statement provides the opening gambit for the introduction to Burchard’s book, The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV, about one of France’s most celebrated, if maligned, artists, whose contemporary influence and posthumous legacy he seeks to redefine through the concept of sovereignty.

The author presents Le Brun as a benevolent (albeit ferociously ambitious) sovereign of the arts. In Early Modern Europe sovereign power was thought, at best, to be a form of non-arbitrary authority, whereby a ruler governed as a father to the people by a strict moral code, for the greater good. Le Brun, Burchard argues, was not a tyrannical dictator, but __more a patriarch among the community of artists who served the Sun King; his control was not arbitrary, but based on mutual respect between him and the artists and artisans he supervised.

Revealing how Le Brun’s authority conforms to the contemporary political structures of Louis XIV’s France, this study is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature re-evaluating the artist’s oeuvre. (The catalogue for the impressive Le Brun exhibition staged at Louvre-Lens in 2016 being foremost among these.) Indeed, Burchard’s book comes at an exciting time for the study of 17th- and 18th-century French art, with scholars today providing nuanced and sympathetic accounts of the period, moving past the political and theoretical burdens of previous generations.

Le Brun is, perhaps, best remembered for two things: his ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles that narrates events from the life of Louis XIV, and his lectures on physiognomy and the expression of the passions, neither of which feature prominently in this book. The latter was the subject of Jennifer Montagu’s work, The Expression of the Passions (1994), the only serious monographic study on the artist to be published in English until now. And while it would have been interesting for Burchard to bring his considerable insight into Le Brun’s oeuvre to an analysis of his cycle for the Hall of Mirrors, it would be impossible to cover all that the artist designed, and advised on, throughout his career in one book. This study concentrates on the lesser-known aspects of his oeuvre, particularly his designs for decorative arts and architecture, while synthesising the __more comprehensive French and German literature for an anglophone audience.

Six chapters guide the reader through Le Brun’s sphere of influence, from the works executed by his own hand, to a multitude of objects made under his supervision that can be attributed through the repetition of motifs that he designed when other evidence is lacking. The most fascinating works discussed in this study no longer exist, or were never fully realised: a celebrated equestrian portrait of Louis XIV; an obelisk fountain for the precinct of the Louvre’s east facade; an unfinished commission for 93 Savonnerie carpets for the Louvre; and the celebrated Ambassadors’ Staircase at Versailles. The last chapter devoted to the staircase draws together Burchard’s insightful analyses of the diverse painted, built and woven monuments to Louis XIV’s reign to reassemble the fragments of Le Brun’s designs and influence into more complete account of his practice.

Burchard’s most fascinating insight, however, is his analogy between Le Brun’s designs and frontispieces for Early Modern books. The analogy is structural as much as symbolic: the lost equestrian portrait of Louis XIV reappears in a frontispiece for a philosophical treatise; Le Brun’s designs for the facade and fountain for the Louvre function as a frontispiece to the palace; the Savonnerie carpet for the Salon Carré serves as a frontispiece for the grande galerie of the Louvre; the Ambassadors’ Staircase at Versailles “was a three-dimensional frontispiece advertising the grandeur of the spaces that lay behind”. The frontispiece to a book refers to both its subject and its author in images and inscriptions, just as Le Brun’s designs both celebrate his patron and simultaneously reveal his authorship. This insightful analogy forms a thread that not only connects the chapters of this book, but provides a coherent characterisation of the artist’s approach to representing Louis XIV across media.

• Robert Wellington is a lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University in Canberra. His research focuses on the material and intellectual culture of Louis XIV’s court. His book Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV was published by Ashgate (2015)

The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV
Wolf Burchard
Paul Holberton Publishing, 288pp, £40 (hb)

Vito Acconci, Body Art trailblazer, poet and architect, has died, aged 77

The US artist and architect Vito Acconci, known for his radical conceptual works such as Seedbed (1972), has died age 77. The Bronx-born artist turned poet and architect, who is considered a Body Art trailblazer, arguably paved the way for a later generation of artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Matthew Barney and Paul McCarthy.

Acconci received his BA with a major in literature from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1962. After publishing a magazine called 0 to 9 from 1967 to 1969, he turned to photography, documenting passers-by that he followed on the street for the work Following Piece (1969). The work explores “his body’s occupancy of public space through the execution of preconceived actions or activities”, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which owns photographs from the series. For Seedbed, he spent hours masturbating beneath a ramp at the Sonnabend gallery in New York while whispering aloud his fantasies about visitors.

Vito Acconci, Step Piece (1970). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

From the late 1970s, he began making experimental sculptures, furniture and public art pieces, including Birth of the Car/Birth of the Boat (1988) located in Pittsburgh, Name Calling Chair (1990) and Flying Floors at Philadelphia International Airport which was unveiled in 1988. The same year, he established his own architecture practice, Acconci Studio, which is based in Brooklyn.

Last year, MoMA PS1 in New York presented a survey of Acconci’s works of the 1960s and 1970s, exploring the artist’s early poetry, sound and video pieces. The show—Vito Acconci: Where we are now (Who are we anyway?) 1976—included the Super 8 film Shadow Play (1970) in which Acconci shadowboxed in front of a blinding light, and the film Openings (1970) which showed the artist pulling out his body hair. Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1, told The New York Times last year: “He’s challenging our limits about what we want to be private and what we want to be public, and those questions have only become __more important.”

Installation view of Vito Acconci's show at MoMA PS1. PS1, 2016. Image courtesy of Acconci Studio and MoMA PS1. Photo by Pete Deevakul.

Acconci talked to The Art Newspaper in 2002 when he reflected on his early career. The artist said: “After college, I went to a writing school at the University of Iowa. After that, I came back to New York in 1964 and that was the first time I realised art galleries existed. That was when I saw a Jasper Johns painting for the first time… Jasper Johns was the big influence, the notion of how to make abstraction possible using convention first, use a flag, use a number 5, as long as you have that you can make any impression you like, as long as you have the given. It so shaped the way I thought, it made me recognise conventions, that there’s no such thing as ‘creation’ just organisation and re-organisation, dis-organisation.”

Asked whether he thought he should subsequently make art, he said:  “I thought I had no desire to make art. But I realised when I was writing I was using the page as something to travel over and that if I was so interested in moving across this space I should move over a floor, over a street, a ground. But also by 1967, phrases like ‘conceptual art’ were first being used. If conceptual art hadn’t been around there wouldn’t have been any place for me. Entrance is only possible at certain times and in certain contexts. I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t build but once someone said conceptual art I thought maybe I can do that, I have ideas, there’s a place for me.”

Tate Modern, Hepworth Wakefield and John Soane's museum shortlisted for Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award

The Art Fund’s Museum of the Year shortlist has been announced with the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham; the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art, Newmarket; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London; Tate Modern, London; and the Hepworth Wakefield nominated for the £100,000 prize. For the first time, the other shortlisted museums will also receive £10,000 each.
 
The winning museum will be announced 5 July at the British Museum in London. The judging panel includes high-profile names from the culture sector such as Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum; Munira Mirza, former deputy mayor of London for education and culture; and the artist Richard Deacon. Jo Whiley, the BBC Radio 2 DJ and presenter, is also on the panel.
 

Tate Modern's Herzog & de Meuron-designed Switch House extension opened in June (Photo: © Marc Atkins)

Tate Modern opened its Herzog & de Meuron-designed Switch House extension last June, drawing 143,000 visitors in its first three days. Meanwhile, Hepworth Wakefield launched an ambitious programme last year to mark its fifth anniversary, with shows dedicated to Martin Parr and Stanley Spencer, as well as hosting the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Last autumn, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London completed a seven-year, £7m project to reinstate its founder’s original design.
 

The Sir John Soane’s Museum in London completed a seven-year project to reinstate its founder’s original design (Photo: © Marc Atkins)

The least well known nominees include the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art, described by The Art Fund as a “cultural hub in the heart of Newmarket which combines the history, science, art and culture of horseracing with the finest examples of British sporting art, together with an opportunity for visitors to meet former racehorses in the restored stables and newly-built arena.” 

The Lapworth Museum of Geology, part of the University of Birmingham, is another underdog. It reopened last June after a £2.7m redevelopment and is commended for bringing to life __more than 250,000 objects, ranging from fossils to volcanic rocks.

• 
  A young visitor gets to grips with a sabre-toothed skull at the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham (Photo: © Marc Atkins)
• 
  Finding the next George Stubbs: life painting with a twist at the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art in Newmarket (Photo: © Marc Atkins)

The Art Fund director Stephen Deuchar, says: “Whether unveiling new buildings, galleries, displays or public programmes, all the finalists have shown a real commitment to innovation and experimentation, offering fresh perspectives and news ways of seeing and understanding their collections.” Last year's winner was the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 

Pictures Generation artist confronts ‘alternative facts’ at MoMA

Edvard Munch gets novel treatment from Karl Ove Knausgård

Janelle Monáe celebrates the MCA Chicago

The musician and actress Janelle Monáe—who had a supporting role in this year’s Best Picture Academy Awards winner, Moonlight (and starred in category contender, Hidden Figures)—will help the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA Chicago) celebrate its 50th birthday this June. Monáe is due to perform at the museum’s MCA ArtEdge: 50 gala on Saturday, 3 June, which gives a sneak peek of the exhibition Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats its Own Leg (6 June-24 September), featuring sculptures, monumental paintings and illustrations from across the Japanese artist’s career. Pharrell Williams, the musician turned contemporary art collaborator, who has worked with Murakami, handpicked Monáe for the evening’s musical lineup. (And yes—octopus will be on the dinner menu.)

Fondation Louis Vuitton offers a snapshot of contemporary African art

In pictures: St Petersburg’s Winter Palace ransacked after the Bolshevik Revolution

Dramatic images of St Petersburg’s ransacked Winter Palace after the Bolshevik Revolution are going on show in London for one weekend only. Calvert 22 Foundation, which supports contemporary art from Russia and Eastern Europe, is exhibiting around 20 photographs (enlarged reproductions of the original prints) from the archives of the State Hermitage Museum, which has occupied the Baroque former residence of the Russian tsars since October 1917. The partnership underpins a year-long season of events marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution.

The display traces the rapid evolution of the palace from the centre of celebrations for the ruling Romanov dynasty’s 300th anniversary in 1913 to a symbol of the destruction of the old regime. The still-new medium of photography captured the meeting of Russia’s moderate interim government in the library of Tsar Nicholas II after the February Revolution, the preparation of works of art for evacuation and the all-female battalion that defended the palace against Lenin’s Bolsheviks. A number of the prints only entered the Hermitage archives in the 1990s as a gift from the widow of the author P.F. Gubchevsky, who wrote the museum’s historic guidebook.

• 
  Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna leaving the Winter Palace on 21 February 1913 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov (Photo: Yuri Molodkovets © The State Hermitage Museum)
• 
  The personal guard of Alexander Kerensky, leader of the interim government after the February Revolution, stationed outside the door of his office in the Winter Palace (Photo: Yuri Molodkovets © The State Hermitage Museum)
• 
  Alexander Kerensky (second from right), the leader of the interim government after the February Revolution, meets with his war council in the tsar's library (Photo: Yuri Molodkovets © The State Hermitage Museum)
• 
  The evacuation of imperial works of art (Photo: Yuri Molodkovets © The State Hermitage Museum)
• 
  Soldiers of the women's battalion, the Winter Palace's last line of defence against the Bolsheviks (Photo: Yuri Molodkovets © The State Hermitage Museum)
• 
  Karl Kubesh's photograph of the cabinet of Tsar Nicholas II after the storming of the palace in October 1917 (Photo: Yuri Molodkovets © The State Hermitage Museum)

The Museum After the Revolution opens today (until Sunday 30 April) as a visual counterpoint to a conference of the same name co-organised by the foundation and the Hermitage (28-29 April). With a keynote address by the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, and panel discussions on topics such as the legacy of the imperial jeweller Carl Fabergé, Soviet museum policy in the 1920s and the collective silence around the Prague Spring in 1968, the event explores the impact of the Russian Revolution on museum collections across the former Soviet bloc.

The champion of the new: Kenneth Baker on the Dwan Gallery at Lacma

The dealer and collector Virginia Dwan's 57th Street gallery in New York had already delivered several shocks—including my first encounter with Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, although Paula Cooper had shown them earlier—when I was sent there in 1971 to review a show of Carl Andre's sculpture as a novice contributor to Artforum.

That assignment made possible a critical and formative confrontation with a key question: what could make this—something so barren of expressive, communicative form or intent—art?

Andre's metal plate sculptures did not sit comfortably on the Dwan Gallery's carpeted floor, but that aesthetic dissonance heightened their rebarbative strangeness. By that encounter and a few others (such as with Richard Serra's debut at Leo Castelli's upper Manhattan warehouse space in 1968), I was imprinted in the manner that Harold Rosenberg had warned young critics about: thereafter, I would weigh all the new art I saw in relation to the formal rigour and philosophical ambition of Minimalism and Post-minimalism.

Dwan's gift in 2013 to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, of 250 works of Modern and contemporary art has now occasioned the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959-71, which is on now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma). But the survey show—which first opened at the National Gallery last September and is organised by James Meyer—seems timely for other reasons also.

It comes at a moment when American and European art dealers wonder openly whether the old business model of retail exhibition space still makes sense in a global market transfigured by mushrooming art fairs and internet commerce.

On the one hand, Dwan is a precursor of the multi-venue gallery system that exists today with Gagosian, Pace, Marian Goodman and others. Dwan was one of the first to operate galleries concurrently in Los Angeles and New York. On the other hand, for visitors with memories of her exhibitions, she personifies the cultural leadership toward which, in the pre-internet age, a curious art public looked for direction on the most challenging and consequential new art of the day.

To Lacma visitors without memories of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Dwan Gallery survey will serve as a synopsis of the transitions from early installation and Pop art to Minimalism, Conceptual art and Earthworks.

Dwan bravely sponsored the work of the Los Angeles assemblagist and art impresario Edward Kienholz, whose grungy and humorous work Back Seat, Dodge '38 (1964)—a found and fabricated object tableau of backseat sex—will strike many who know its history as a marker of the puritan spirit of an earlier age. When it was first shown at Dwan's gallery, it sparked public and legal allegations of obscenity. Terms permitting its public display were finally negotiated after an onslaught of negative publicity.

• 
  Virginia Dwan at home in New York in 1969. (Photo: Roger Prigen, Courtesy Virginia Dwan Archive)
• 
  Walter De Maria's 35-Pole Lightning Field (1974). (Photograph by Helen Winkler-Fosdick)

The courage of Dwan's proprietorship shines no less brightly in her early championing of European artists __more than a world away from Los Angeles, such as Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Arman, each represented here by works of exemplary quality and spirit.

Early sculptures by Robert Smithson, such as the lapidary Glass Stratum (1967), have their own fascination here, as they did when Dwan first showed them in New York. But they faintly foreshadow the ambition of his Spiral Jetty (1970), the Earthwork he built on the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake thanks to Dwan's patronage.

The seldom-shown film that Smithson made to document—and, in his eccentric manner, account for—the Spiral Jetty plays continually in the exhibition. Those lucky enough to have known him will find his voice on the soundtrack and the helicopter views of his lank figure stumbling along the Jetty almost painfully moving.

Through scrim-covered windows in the Smithson gallery, visitors can glimpse Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass (2012), Lacma's permanent installation of a 340-ton boulder beneath which visitors can walk for a taste of stone in the sky. In 1969, Dwan sponsored Heizer's Double Negative, another defining project of Land Art. Into the facing walls of a canyon in the remote Nevada desert, the artist cut a slot and removed nearly a quarter million tons of earth to make the work.

Double Negative continues to ignite younger artists' imaginations, even though comparatively few people have visited the deliberately forbidding site. Just a week ago, I happened to see a 2014 looped video by the Oakland artist Marshall Elliott titled Improbable Irrigation (Double Negative). It shows an impulse sprinkler atop the ridge at one end of Heizer's piece absurdly and impudently watering the vast cavity below.

A group of large photographs speak to another of Dwan's greatest acts of patronage: the 35-pole "test field" in Arizona that Walter De Maria built as a precursor to his 400-part installation The Lightning Field (1977), one of the greatest works of art of the late-20th century.

Documentation of this summit of Land Art reminds me of Dwan's most powerful New York show: her 1969 presentation of De Maria's Beds of Spikes—pieces so potentially injurious to clumsy viewers that one had to sign a liability release before entering the room.

Perhaps Lacma organisers found the presentation of Beds of Spikes impractical, or loan restrictions may have been prohibitive. But no work in the exhibition, and none other absent from it, better evokes the fire of Virginia Dwan's commitment to sharing the most powerful new art she could find.

The museum's presentation of the Dwan Gallery's history serves an obvious educational purpose. It is invaluable to students of the art and art history programmes in the Los Angeles region. It also serves notice to nostalgics and utopians alike that art's social and institutional history cannot be repeated. The moment betokened by Los Angeles to New York will never come again, but it may prove fundamental to a cultural future we almost dare not dream of.

Kenneth Baker retired in 2015 after 30 years as resident art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is an Art Newspaper correspondent based in San Francisco

Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959-71, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, until 10 September

Forced migration anchors a show in Italy

Gold watch? Serota just wants a dinghy

A furore has erupted at Tate after a notice was posted in the museum's staff rooms asking for voluntary contributions towards a leaving present for the director, Nicholas Serota, who steps down in June after 28 years in post. “We have thought long and hard about what to get, and decided to put money towards a sailing boat. Nick loves sailing, and this would be a lasting and very special reminder of the high regard which I know so many of us have for Nick and his contribution to Tate,” the appeal stated. Social media posts claimed staff were being asked to chip in for a “yacht” (prompting The Guardian to go overboard—pardon the pun—which reported that junior staff were incensed at the lavish parting prezzie). A Tate spokeswoman tells us that the idea for Serota’s gift came from the staff themselves who wanted to mark his years of service to Tate. “Contributions towards the purchase of a small dinghy, which the staff thought would be an original gift, are entirely voluntary,” she adds. Research undertaken on the dinghy market shows that prices vary wildly, ranging from £12.90 for an inflatable Sea River Pool rowing raft boat to a Honwave T35-AE2 model which goes for a whopping £819.99 (no danger then of a Serota super yacht upsetting local sailors off St Ives). 

Satellite dish: what to see at fairs outside the Frieze New York tent

1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair
159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, u ntil 7 May
1-54.com
Just down the road from the fair, Red Hooks Labs (133-135 Imlay Street) is presenting an exhibition of works by the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. The show, The Eye of Modern Mali, is organised with 1:54 and the Parisian gallery MAGNIN-A and looks at the artist’s depictions of the people of Mali in the period just after independence in 1960. “Sidibé paved the way for a looser, __more candid style of photography decades before any kind of street photography,” says Touria El Glaoui, 1:54’s founding director. An earlier iteration of the show was presented at 1:54 in London last October.

Art New York and Context
Pier 94, 55th Street and 12th Avenue, until 7 May
artnyfair.com and contextnyfair.com
To mark the 30th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s death, the Alfstad & Contemporary gallery is presenting photographs taken by Christophe von Hohenberg of the artist’s memorial service in New York in 1987. Among the guests that day were Tom Wolfe, Keith Haring and Yoko Ono. “It marked the end of era,” says the gallery’s founder, Sam Alfstad. Meanwhile, Pablo Helguera (a contributor to The Art Newspaper) is presenting a project from which all profits will go to various charitable organisations. “The artwork is nothing but a certificate of what that cause [that the funds go to] is”, he says. The work is titled All Proceeds.

Collective Design Fair
550 Washington Street, until 7 May
collectivedesignfair.com
The landscape architect Brook Klausing has designed an indoor garden as a respite from the fair. The space, built in part of timber salvaged from the Rockaway boardwalk after Hurricane Sandy, includes planters with flowering perennials and trellising ivy. “The overall feeling is stolen from the storyboard of the set designer that created Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,” Klausing says, noting that he aims for simplicity that nevertheless commands attention.

Fridge
603 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, u ntil 6 May
fridgeartfair.com
The scrappy Fridge art fair returns this year in a new venue—the Branded Saloon, a bar in the Prospect Heights area of Brooklyn. This year’s theme is Love and Torture, which the fair organisers landed on after trying to come up with an idea that captured the moment. Initially, love alone was to be the focus, but “we managed to start torturing ourselves over politics again and, half-kidding, I said, ‘OK, it’s got to be Love and Torture’”, says Linda DiGusta, Fridge’s curator. A pop-up section of the fair will take place at the nearby Nu Hotel on Smith Street.

Salon Zürcher Africa
33 Bleecker Street, u ntil 7 May
galeriezurcher.com
The 19th edition of this mini-fair is also the second edition of Salon Zürcher Africa. Five galleries from New York, Paris, Nairobi and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia will present works by artists including Malick Sidibé, Nelson Makamo and Onyis Martin. Portraiture is a key theme, says the dealer Sitor Senghor, whose eponymous Parisian gallery will be included in the fair. Although each exhibitor will have his or her own presentation, Senghor says each will focus on work that focuses on “personhood” and “the importance of being real and alive”.

Spring/Break Bklyn Immersive
300 Flatbush Avenue Extension, 7-14 May
springbreakartshow.com
Large-scale work is the focus of the first edition of Spring Break Brooklyn, an offshoot of the Spring Break fair founded in 2009 by Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly. “We’re deliberately shifting from our typical model of the ‘art fair’ with [a] focus on immersive environments created with site-specific installations,” Gori says. Around a dozen artists, including Jason Peters, Grace Villamil and Melissa Godoy-Nieto will be included in a ground-floor space in downtown Brooklyn. “The goal remains the same,” Gori says: “activating non-traditional art spaces and providing a free exhibition platform to curators and artists.”

Superfine! New York
459 West 14th Street, u ntil 7 May
superfine.world
Twenty-three galleries plus 27 artists representing themselves will show work at the Superfine fair, which focuses on art priced at $1,000-$10,000. Affordability is a point of pride for the organisers and each exhibitor will show at least one work priced at less than $1,000. This allows an opening for artists representing themselves. “There’s also obviously a bigger risk as they have to cover rent, fair exhibition fees, and all other costs of owning a business, but the benefit is that, if they market their work and the gallery correctly, they’ll keep all of the take from work that is sold,” the fair’s founder and director, Alex Mitow.

Portal Art Fair
435 Broome Street, 3-8 May
4heads.org/portal-2016
Thirty artists are included in the second edition of the Portal art fair, which this year takes place in a 2,000 sq. ft space in SoHo. Artists range in style, from representational painters to photographers and sculptors. What brings the fair together, says one of the its co-founders, Antony Zito, is an emphasis on "how location, architecture, and context changes the experience of art and changes the way artists approach" their work. Among those included in the show are the Iranian-American painter Zahra Nazari and the New York-based German photographer Martina Kaendler.

The best shows in town during Frieze New York

Anish Kapoor: Descension
Public Art Fund, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1
Until 10 September
To celebrate the non-profit public art organisation’s 40th anniversary, the Indian-born British artist has brought a work from his 2015 solo show at the Palace of Versailles to New York: a 26-ft- diameter pool of spiralling dark liquid that will be installed next to the East River. The “continuously swirling mass converges in a central vortex, as if being sucked endlessly into the earth’s depths, generating physical, cultural and even political resonances”, says Nicholas Baume, the director of the Public Art Fund. “The work grows out of Kapoor’s longstanding interest in the potential of water as a sculptural medium.”

IA still from Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015-16). Courtesy MoMA PS1

Ian Cheng: Emissaries
MoMA PS1
Until 25 September
In his first solo museum presentation in the US, the American artist shows the entire series of his Emissary Trilogy (2015-17)—complex live computer simulations that he describes as “a video game that plays itself”, which the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently bought. The works are shown via 10 ft-tall projections that form an immersive environment in the gallery space, allowing viewers to follow and intervene with the narrative of characters and wildlife, navigating situations such as natural disasters and elections. Throughout the exhibition, the installations will be streamed live online via Twitch, a social media platform for gamers.

Anicka Yi’s installation Lifestyle Wars (2017), in her Guggenheim show. Courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Hugo Boss Prize 2016: Anicka Yi, Life is Cheap
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Until 5 July
As part of the biennial art prize—in addition to the $100,000—Yi is showing an installation that includes olfactory art, a long-held interest. In this case, the central scent, named Immigrant Caucus, is based on chemical compounds drawn from Asian American women and carpenter ants. “Hopefully the installation inspires a wide and unpredictable range of responses, but one thing I think visitors might turn over in their minds after seeing the show is the way sensory perception is powerfully influenced by cultural forces and assumptions, rather than being purely biological in nature,” says the show’s curator, Katherine Brinson.

Lygia Pape, Roda dos prazeres (Wheel of Pleasures) (1967). Photo: Paula Pape © Projeto Lygia Pape

Lygia Pape: a Multitude of Forms
The Met Breuer
Until 23 July
Originally making pristine, if relatively rigid, geometric abstractions, the late artist—now one of the most important figures in Brazilian Modern art—reached artistic maturity under Brazil’s military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985. About halfway through the show, Pape’s first career survey in the US, viewers encounter a projected video of a vast white cloth cut with holes from which dozens of smiling faces poke through. Titled Divisor (Divider), this participatory work, first staged in 1968 in Rio de Janeiro, is an encapsulation of some of Brazilian Neo-Concretism’s main claims and ambitions: to make the activation of space a political metaphor.

Local police find fruit with spells (2017) by the artists GCC, at the Whitney Museum. Courtesy Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; and Project Native Informant, London; photo Bill Orcutt, courtesy Whitney Museum

2017 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art
Until 11 June
Tension, upheaval, uncertainty, disorientation: do these themes sound familiar? They are the persistent refrain of many recent biennials because they are the persistent problems of our time. The 2017 Whitney Biennial is the largest ever edition in terms of square footage, occupying around two-thirds of the museum’s exhibition space and featuring 63 artists based in the US, irrespective of original nationality. It maintains the general insistence on disorder but the tone is milder, both conceptually and formally. A wall text at the museum says the biennial “arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarising politics,” which is true, but the sense of alarm seems sometimes like an afterthought.

A garment from Comme de Garcon’s spring/summer 1997 collection. Courtesy Comme des Garçons,  Photo © Paolo Roversi, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: the Art of the In-Between
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Until 4 September 
The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition celebrates the Japanese avant-garde designer of the fashion house Comme des Garçons, only the second living designer to have a monographic exhibition at the museum since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983. Comprising around 150 womenswear designs dating from the house’s debut in the early 1980s to the most recent collection, the show explores previously undisclosed elements of the designer’s career (Kawakubo rarely gives interviews or discusses the concept of her collections). “Although she still rejects the label of artist for herself, preferring the epithet ‘clothes maker’, she’s begun to consider fashion as art,” says the curator Andrew Bolton, who collaborated with the designer in organising the show.

Lawler’s Big (adjusted to fit) (2002-16). © Louise Lawler, courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures

Louise Lawler: Why Pictures Now
Museum of Modern Art
Until 30 July
Lawler presents 40 years’ worth of her work, including the project Birdcalls (1972-81), in which she chirps the names of male artists. Also on show are “adjusted to fit” pictures, edited examples of earlier works altered for specific locations. “In 2017, at a moment when the subject of truth and fake news came to the forefront of national discourse, the artist tweaked her ‘adjusted to fit’ images by adding a twisting or twirling dimension to certain works, further distorting them as a reaction to the concept of ‘alternative facts’,” says the show’s curator Roxana Marcoci.

A poster for the 1972 Cookin’ & Smokin’ show © Dindga McCannon. Photo: David Lusenhop

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85
Brooklyn Museum
Until 17 September
The exhibition features works by __more than 40 black female artists concerned with socio-political issues. One highlight of the show is a poster for the 1972 exhibition Cookin’ & Smokin’ at the Nyumba Ya Sanaa Gallery in Harlem. The space was run by the Weusi art collective, which was conceived as a ‘brotherhood’ of mostly black men. The collaboration “was indicative of the women’s close relationship with their male counterparts in the Black Arts Movement, in contrast to the distant relationship with their white female counterparts in the mainstream feminist movement”, says Rujeko Hockley, who co-organised the show.

French cultural groups organise anti-Le Pen rally

A citizens' rally, Culture against the Front National, is taking place this evening, 2 May, at the Philharmonie de Paris in protest against Marine Le Pen's presidential bid.

Orlan, one of the artists attending the rally, has made an anti-Le Pen declaration calling on people to vote for the centrist Emmanuel Macron. “Let's barricade Le Pen who makes references to tradition, although there are nice and festive traditions,” Orlan says.

Accusing Le Pen of being against freedom of expression, she says: “Freedom is needed by all of us and for artists working on the representation of the body and with the body, we absolutely need freedom of expression, without which we cannot make any work. Le Pen would like to prevent us from showing the body, sex and our sexuality even though we are all made alike.”

Orlan refers to her own work, La Liberté en Ecorchée (Flayed Liberty, 2013), to highlight the need of ethnic tolerance. “La Liberté en Ecorchée is a self-portrait in 3D video but above all a manifesto artwork, this character is skinless. One can't see if the skin is white, black, yellow or read; racism cannot be inscribed.”

Although Le Pen has temporarily stepped down from presiding over the party in order to widen her appeal, her nationalistic programme remains harshly criticised by art professionals. According to the latest poll, Le Pen is expected to gain 41% of the votes, with Macron winning by 59%.

Some 60 organisations and associations—including the CFDT-Culture (the Ministry of Culture's union), AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and CIPAC (Federation of Contemporary Art Professionals)—are calling on people to vote against Le Pen on 7 May. The rally, aimed at highlighting cultural diversity and open-mindedness, will include artists' reactions and performances.
“We cannot accept the banalisation of the Front National and its anti-democratic ideas of rejecting the other and an inward-looking attitude [...] that runs contrary to republican values,” reads a statement from the organisers.

“Voting against the Front National means voting for Macron because a blank vote would benefit the Front National,” says Raphael Cuir, the president of AICA France. “In the FN's 144 engagements, culture is reduced to heritage, to the 'promotion of the national novel', which translates as 'national propaganda',” adds Cuir, who fears that, “The FN in power would be the end of the freedom of expression and the Ministry of Culture's vital support in all forms of cultural and contemporary, artistic expression.”

A parallel event this evening at La Colonie, the arts space opened by the artist Kader Attia in Paris, is a programming of 100 anti-racism poems. “I believe that Marine Le Pen and culture is like radical Islamists and culture: hatred of freedom and difference,” says the French-Algerian artist.