From our Johnny-on-the-spot George Shaw…
Marina Abramovic, Generator, 2014
According to Marina Abramovic, to participate in her new installation work Generator at the Sean Kelly Gallery is to no longer be a “mere spectator, but an active and indeed crucial element of the exhibition.” Blindfolded and donning noise-cancelling headphones, participants are guided into a bare gallery and left to expand their self-awareness and inner-consciousness by confronting the “full emptiness” and communal energy in the room, as well as the occasional co-participant and concrete column. For a view of daily proceedings, go to generatorskny.tumblr.com
John Baldessari, I Wouldn’t Even Try, 2014
After more than five decades of suggesting ‘third-party’ meanings through various forms of visual and textual juxtapositions, 83-year old John Baldessari continues to explore narrative potentials with his new series Movie Scripts/Art at the Marian Goodman Gallery. This time art historical images are coupled as decontextualised details that hide their lineage with found and fabricated extracts from movie scripts that are almost impossible to identify. Depending on your disposition, the two halves either make sense or screw with your mind in a most Baldessarian way.
Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2004
Installed across two galleries, Sotheby’s S/2 and Venus Over Manhattan, Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibition Cosa Nostra is his largest ever gallery show since the infamous Guggenheim retrospective in 2011, after which he announced his retirement. With a significant number of the agent provocateur’s most well-known works on show such as Him, Hitler’s head atop a kneeling 12-year old boy’s body with hands clasped in prayer, Cattelan’s mocking, confronting and bittersweet take on the contradictions of contemporary life can either be embraced or dismissed, but never ignored.
