Miami: Communal Creations at MOCA & Galerie Perrotin

Photo by Aaron Igler, courtesy Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Christian Philipp Muller, "A Sense of Friendliness, Mellowness, Permanence" (1991). On view at Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

Photo courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami

FriendsWithYou, "Buddy Chub" (2007). On view at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami

Martin Kippenberger Welcome to Amerika Museum Director Fired After Defending Controversial Crucified Frog Sculpture Deutsche Bank Permanently Loans 600 Works to Staedel Pope Did Not Criticize Kippenberger Artwork Museum Votes to Keep Kippenberger's Frog on Display Pope Gets in on Crucified Frog Debate Cary Leibowitz in New York

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Barely a decade later, when the commodification of the artist seems to have reached an apogee, the past seems ever more prescient. As curator Bennett Simpson puts it in his catalog essay, “Any act of telling history is also an act of telling the present.”  

Germany’s Martin Kippenberger provides, perhaps, the perfect vehicle for the show. The artist acted out his flawed personality “to the extreme,” according to Andrea Fraser, who reimagines one of his drunken monologues from the mid-1990s in her video titled after his exhortation to her: Art Must Hang (2001). Kippenberger’s winking manipulation of the cult of the artist is all the more prophetic in light of the soaring value of his work since his premature death from liver cancer in 1997.

In his crib notes to the exhibition Simpson reassures viewers that, “the art that came out of this scene can be intensely self-reflexive and exclusive. If you feel like you’re not getting the jokes, you are getting the gist just fine.”

But he has also extended the show’s boundaries beyond Cologne to artists working in New York and Los Angeles then and now, and by doing so, he makes a case for Cologne as an ethos that transcended geographic borders. This decision enables the inclusion of such poignant pieces as Josephine Pryde’s Chains (2004), which pays homage to Eva Hesse’s delicate, organic, dripping fiberglass and rope sculptures of 1969 and ’70 (and nods to her posthumous enshrinement). Pryde’s version is rendered in motorcycle gears and chainsaw wire, like an industrial-age armor shielding world-weary artists from the intrusions of the market and the media.

Stephen Prina’s Galerie Max Hetzler (1991) sets traditional archival photographs from the gallery’s height between 1988 and 1990 against lettering fragmented from the statement, “We represent ourselves to the world.”

An artist-run alternative space is commemorated in Friesenwall 120 Ruined (2006), Stephan Dillemuth and Nils Norman’s commissioned memorial of fractured walls hung with drawings, paintings, and text, and accompanied by sound and video clips.

Cologne native Jutta Koether’s 2003 collaboration with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon revisits the Club in the Shadows they operated out of Kenny Schachter’s now-defunct Rove gallery in the West Village. In their re-creation, the happening has become a shadow of its former self, with flimsy tinsel-flanked remnants clinging dejectedly to a back corner of MOCA’s galleries. A listening nook lined with albums from musician-visual artists of the era provides a rare homey touch in a show that can feel too sterile to evoke the sensory experience of the time and place at its heart.

A Nebulous Web

Simpson’s tangentially inclusive approach can dissipate the exhibition’s central conceit and pointed commentary into a nebulous web. Nonetheless, that loose network epitomizes the decentralization of the art world. As artists continue to struggle to build communities in which they can feel at home and express their inner natures, “Make Your Own Life” makes a thoughtful effort to form a discernable constellation of an art scene that, like Miami’s today, confounds attempts to easily encapsulate it as a cohesive movement.

Meanwhile, “Guild,” at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, through July 21, gathers together a handful of individuals connected through its curator, the Miami-based artist Daniel Arsham.

The skilled young sculptor and draughtsman was one of the driving forces behind the now-defunct, do-it-yourself House alternative space and the artist-run gallery Placemaker that followed (before it also folded, after the arrival of Perrotin, who represented several of its artists). For this show, Arsham invited three artists he met while studying at Cooper Union and the Miami-based duo FriendsWithYou to exhibit in Perrotin’s gallery.