Tuesday, December 21, 2004
From the Floor's Top Ten, 2004
Since everyone else seems to be doing it this week, I don't want to be left behind.
Rather than getting all fussy with a top ten list, I decided to limit my scope to large museum exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. I did, though, end up breaking my own rule with one item.
Links are to blog posts I wrote on these shows. Items aren't listed in any particular order.
Rather than getting all fussy with a top ten list, I decided to limit my scope to large museum exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. I did, though, end up breaking my own rule with one item.
Links are to blog posts I wrote on these shows. Items aren't listed in any particular order.
- Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The messy Brooklyn biennial that convincingly made the case for Brooklyn as the center of the New York art world.
- Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials at the Tate Modern. Most of the time, I can either take or leave Nauman's work. This one I'll take.
- Between Past and Future: Photography and Video from China at the Asia Society and ICP. A ground-breaking exhibition that introduced a number of Chinese artists to the American public. This show could do for the contemporary Chinese art market what King Tut did for Egyptian antiquities.
- Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Centre Pompidou. Seeing typology after typology gives a new appreciation for the scope of work these two have accomplished and hints at how much more than photography is involved in their project.
- Lee Bontecou at MoMA QNS. A wonderful retrospective that I continue to wish I had seen in its entirety in one of its previous venues.
- Spiral Jetty, dry. This was the year that saw Smithson's most famous work become landlocked in a new salt flat at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Waters advance and recede. Spiral Jetty remains.
- The re-installation of MoMA's permanent collection. I haven't yet seen a top ten list that includes the re-opening of MoMA in Manhattan. How can it be that the return of the world's greatest collection of modern art hasn't made a single list?
- Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) at the Guggenheim (no blog post; link is to the exhibition website). The east-coast entry in this year's minimalist triumvirate didn't get as much attention as the MOCA and LACMA shows. It should have.
- Contemporary Art: Floor to Ceiling, Wall to Wall at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Not the biggest or the best historical exhibition of the year, but it sets the standard for what a gifted curator can do at a good, regional museum.
- Sons & Lumières at the Centre Pompidou. A show on a topic so tangential to twentieth-century art history that it won't have to be done again. The exhibition is so well researched and comprehensive, though, that it probably wouldn't be able to be done again anyway.
