July/August 2008 Field Guide

Collier Schorr on Brooke Shields and the “Fall of America”

Neohoodoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith

Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters

After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy

Sydney Biennale

The House of Victor & Rolf

Valerie Mrejen

Isa Rosenberg

Every artist's worst nightmare comes to HBO

Dominique Gonzales-Foerster

Lygia Clark

Above the Fold

246 and Counting

Female Trouble

Manifesta 7

Site Santa Fe International Biennial

Not Quite How I Remember It

Zoe Leonard August Strindberg Urban Studies Clear Vision Helping the Homeless, Doing it Up for Dia Philippe Vergne on Directing Dia Swedish Police Recover Stolen Strindberg Painting

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Perhaps it is appropriate that the end of the world would serve as inspiration for Massimiliano Gioni’s first full-scale exhibition at the New Museum. "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur — like creation — in grandiose splendor." So begins Werner Herzog’s 1992 apocalyptic sci-fi film, Lessons of Darkness, a meditative essay using devastating footage from the burning oil fields in Kuwait, and the departure point for Gioni’s "After Nature." Grandiose splendor is what the curator hopes to evoke with works that picture alternative "celestial civilizations" or prophesy the spectacular end of ours, and in an exhibition that intermingles not only the historic and new, but also documents and art objects, he seems likely to meet this goal. "I’ve always been interested in working outside of the parameters of the contemporary artworld," says the 35-year-old director of exhibitions, who helped curate the Berlin Biennial in 2006 as well as Manifesta 5 in 2004, both of which notably included historical artworks. Provenance notwithstanding, Gioni hopes the 90 works by 25 different artists will seem like "archaeological relics from the future." Such relics include Tree (1997), a dead tree winched upright by steel girders that is a rare example of sculpture by photographer Zoe Leonard, as well as 19th-century photograms capturing starlight (actually spots of humidity) by playwright August Strindberg. Not coincidentally, almost a third of the show is video, the anchor piece being a special new edit of Lessons of Darkness. "Remember what happened when people opted for euthanasia in Soylent Green?" Gioni asks, recalling the dystopian 1973 sci-fi flick. "They were shown movies of beautiful natural landscapes while they took their last breath."

www.newmuseum.org

"The end of the world as Massimiliano Gioni knows it" originally appeared in the July/August 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' July/August 2008 Table of Contents.