CULTURE INDEX posting
CULTURE INDEX posting cryptic aphorisms across Manhattan streets. Electronic text soon became her medium of choice, as in the deadpan Times Square billboard of 1982 that displayed the illuminated maxim, PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT. Nearly all of Holzer’s work has this same plaintive, provocative tone. Like social media at its best, it is quick to grasp but reverberates more deeply. And Holzer achieves what social media cannot: perfect placement. It is hard to be more apt than her slogan painted on the side of the 1999 BMW V12 LMR concept car, the first and only BMW to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans race: THE UNATTAINABLE IS INVARIABLY ATTRACTIVE. This year, Holzer has already exhibited in New York, Berlin and Zurich, and over the summer she worked with designer-dujour Virgil Abloh on the catwalk show for his brand Off-White at the Pitti Palace in Florence, a city she also worked in 20 years ago with the fashion bad boy of the previous generation, Helmut Lang. Still to come this year, she is unveiling two major works, at the new US Embassy PAUL KLEE The eclectic Swiss master’s abstract works are the focus of his eponymous exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler (until 21 January; fondationbeyeler.ch), while his wider oeuvre will be displayed in Munich’s Pinakothek der Monderne at Paul Klee: Construction of Mystery (1 March – 10 June; pinakothek.de) and his lasting influence among artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell is the topic at 10 Americans: After Paul Klee, which begins at Zentrum Paul Klee (until 7 January; zpk.org) in Bern and travels to the Phillips Collection (3 February – 6 May; phillipscollection.org) in Washington DC. American artist Jenny Holzer in London and at the new Louvre Abu Dhabi (louvreabudhabi.ae), both permanent, site-specific engravings in the walls. But her most notable creation of 2017 – and the largest project of her career – is happening at a much older site, Blenheim Palace (blenheimpalace.com), one of Britain’s grandest country homes, protected by Unesco and set just outside Oxford. In previous years the palace has hosted Ai 3X3 ART BEAT Three seminal artists have a trio of exhibitions each this season PABLO PICASSO No year goes by without Picasso shows, but this year’s are notable: Picasso 1932 is a landmark collection of works currently at Paris’s Musée Picasso (until 11 February; museepicassoparis. fr) before travelling to Tate Modern (8 March – 9 September; tate.org.uk) in London. The Peggy Guggenheim Museum (until 7 January; guggenheim-venice.it) in Venice is currently showing Picasso on the Beach, an in-depth study of one of his masterpieces, and Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale (until 21 January; scuderiequirinale.it) focuses on one of his most productive periods in Picasso: Between Cubism and Classicism: 1915-1925. Weiwei and other globally renowned artists, but none has engaged with the surroundings in quite such an intimate way – and certainly not as critically. Holzer says she was intrigued that the palace was “a prize for a victory in war”. (The palace was gifted to the Duke of Marlborough by Queen Anne in recognition of his triumph in the 1704 Battle of Blenheim.) For her exhibition, Holzer uses the words of contemporary war survivors in a multitude of mediums to serve as stark reminders of the very human and unglamorous costs of warfare. “Rather than presuming to write about war,” Holzer told The Art Newspaper, “I thought I would leave it to someone who experienced it first hand.” The tension that’s created between the sufferings and the spoils of war is Holzer’s speciality – and it’s more powerful than anything Twitter could achieve. However much social-media savvy her early works display, she needs no help from any platform: she has secured her position as the voice of the pain, the absurdity and the pathos of our modern age. jennyholzer.com ♦ EDGAR DEGAS Honouring the centenary of the French artist’s death, the Musée d’Orsay (until 25 February; musee-orsay.fr) foregrounds his friendship with poet Paul Valéry in Degas, Dance, Drawing. Over at the Petit Palais (until 8 April; petitpalais. paris.fr), The Art of Pastel: From Degas to Redon recognises his mastery of the delicate medium. And in London, the artist’s remarkable abilities as a draughtsman are on display in Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell at the National Gallery (until 7 May; nationalgallery.org.uk). CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NANDA LANFRANCO; EDGAR DEGAS, JOCKEYS IN THE RAIN, THE BURRELL COLLECTION, GLASGOW © CSG CIC GLASGOW MUSEUMS COLLECTION; PABLO PICASSO, THE DREAM, 1932, PRIVATE COLLECTION OF STEVEN COHEN, © CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, © SUCCESSION PICASSO 2017; PAUL KLEE, VOR DEM BLITZ, 1923, FONDATION BEYELER, RIEHEN/BASEL, SAMMLUNG BEYELER, PHOTO: PETER SCHIBLI 52 DEPARTURES-INTERNATIONAL.COM
EMMANUEL LUBEZKI A viewer experiences Carne y Arena REALITY CHECK THE FIRST VR MASTERPIECE Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena – a total immersion in the hearts of undocumented migrants in America – shows the potential of a brand-new art form. BY LEE MARSHALL Aline of weary people is moving towards me, lit by the first rays of dawn across the parched Sonoran Desert. An old woman sinks exhausted to the ground, her thin shoes lacerated by the same cold, gritty sand that I can feel under my bare feet. I walk up to a “coyote”, or people smuggler, just in time to hear him hiss, “Where are you?” into his mobile phone. There are children too … but as I bend to get a better look at one, a helicopter swoops down, blinding me with its searchlight. All of a sudden we’re surrounded by US border guards brandishing weapons and barking orders. “Get down! Now.” Those around me obey, and my knees begin to flex before I will myself to stop. After all, this isn’t really happening to me. I’m just a spectator wearing an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Right? In the uncannily real world created by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Carne y Arena (Flesh and Sand), it’s difficult to be sure. Produced and financed by Legendary Entertainment and Fondazione Prada, the Oscar-winning film director’s new work was created with the help of Industrial Light & Magic’s immersive-experience lab, ILMxLAB, and shot by the Mexican director’s longtime collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, aka Chivo. It debuted in a reduced version at the Cannes Film Festival in May before opening in June at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, where it will stay until 15 January 2018. A US residency at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will run through September 10. (Prada is offering 250 prebooked slots a week; LACMA can accommodate 180.) There’s more to Carne y Arena than the “film” or the dark, sand-strewn, hangar- like space where you absorb it barefoot, helped by two spotters who are there to fit the VR visor and prevent you from walking into a wall. The experience begins in a chilly, strip-lit holding pen, its floor scattered with shoes found in the borderland desert. It ends near a genuine section of rusting US- Mexican border wall from Naco, Arizona. Iñárritu has spoken of his hope that those experiencing Carne y Arena will walk “in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts” – something the installation allows one to do literally, though to reveal how would be a spoiler. Carne y Arena is the latest and most fully realised example of art-house VR. Kathryn Bigelow recently codirected a VR documentary short for National Geographic about a day in the life of a Congolese park ranger. Filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, Laurie Anderson, and Jia Zhangke, are developing or have recently wrapped VR projects. And in September, writer/director Eugene YK Chung’s Arden’s Wake became the first winner of the Venice Film Festival’s VR film category, the first award of its its type at a major international festival. Unlike 3-D, VR is not so much an extension of cinema as a reproducible form of immersive theatre. Festival head Alberto Barbera says that, far from killing cinema, VR may turn out to be “something else entirely, which will develop in ways we can’t predict right now.” After emerging, wide-eyed and stirred, from Carne y Arena, I had a child’s desire to do it again. As it was a quiet press preview day, I got to do just that. But even the second time around wasn’t enough. I kept thinking of other routes I might have taken, parts of the narrative I had perhaps failed to grasp. Rather than being spoonfed the dramatic arc, I was experiencing the narrative in urgent fragments. This was what fascinated me most about Iñárritu’s four-year labour of love: the curious sensation of being inside a story. ♦ DEPARTURES-INTERNATIONAL.COM 53
