Art Photos mixed

The playwright Edward Albee, who has died aged 88, was a generous supporter of fellow writers as well as visual artists, particularly those at the start of their career who needed time and space to realise their creative potential. His foundation offers just that every summer through artists' residencies in a former barn among the dunes of Montauk, Long Island. Selection is based "mostly on talent and need", it states on the foundation's website, cautioning in a deadpan way: "If you are a famous sculptor who has a large summer cottage in East Hampton but would love to 'slum it'*in Montauk for a month, you are much less likely to get in than a painter who holds a terrible day job and lives in Brooklyn with [their] three roommates."

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Museums in Berlin are helping to welcome refugees to the city and its culture with the programme Multaka—from the Arabic word for forum or meeting place—in which trained refugees from Syria and Iraq give free guided museum tours in Arabic to other displaced groups. The programme, started by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museums), offers visits twice a week in four museums: the Museum of Islamic Art and the Museum of the Ancient Near East, two separate museums housed together in the Pergamon Museum; the Byzantine Art Museum in the Bode Museum; and the German Historical Museum (which is not part of the State Museums).The idea for the programme first came about in autumn 2015 and the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs quickly allocated funding. Work on the project began in November 2015, and the first visits took place five weeks later. To date, more than 4,000 visitors have participated in the programme.
At the launch of the programme, 19 guides from Iraq and Syria were recruited by word of mouth among the migrant community in Berlin, and were given a four-day training session. There are now a total of 25 guides, who come from a variety of professional backgrounds, some related to the arts and heritage, others to disciplines like law and economics. One of the original 19 Multaka guides, Bachar al-Chahin, who started working only two months after arriving in Berlin in September 2015, was a tourism guide in Syria and now gives tours at the Museum of the Ancient Near East.



Multaka guide Kefah Ali Deeb, 34, leads a group that includes fellow Syrian refugees through Berlin’s Museum of the Ancient Near East (Image: © UNHCR/Daniel Morgan)

Stefan Weber, the director of the Museum of Islamic Art and one of the Multaka’s initiators, says that the guides often choose artefacts that have special meaning for them. “With the help of objects from our past, questions from our present are debated. Museums become spaces of reflection on collective identities,” he told our sister paper Le Journal des Arts. “Several thousand displaced people have visited the museums, to actively discuss their history and German history, which is important.” At the Pergamon Museum, Iraqis and Syrians have a direct relation with the objects on show, while at the German Historical Museum, the visits mostly involve the post-war period.According to statistics on visitors compiled by Bachar al-Chahin, the majority of visitors are young and well-educated, but for a small amount of visitors, these guided tours are their first trips to a museum.

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Jonas Dahlberg’s highly praised memorial for the victims of the 2011 terror attack on the Utøya island in Norway will probably never get built. Jan Tore Sanner, Norway’s minister of local government and modernisation, said that the government is willing to drop Dahlberg’s proposal in order to reach a settlement with a group of people living close to the memorial site who plan to sue the state in order to stop the project. The group is led by the local Fremskrittspartiet politician Jørn Øverby. The right-wing party is in coalition with Sanner’s larger Conservative party.“

I am convinced that the public debate … is an important part of the grieving process necessary for a community,” Dahlberg says in a statement, adding that “the events of 22 July 2011 were an act of political terrorism. It is more important than ever to talk about its causes and context in the current political climate. A memorial that proposes a state of consensus, a form of silence, would also diminish the events and make it easier for the circumstances to be forgotten in time.”

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Mark Wallinger’s Self Reflection show, in which he has installed a mirror across the entire ceiling of Sigmund Freud’s study at the Freud Museum in London’s Hampstead, is one of the most successful of the many artistic interventions that have taken place in this iconic room. As well as its richly chiming references to Freudian notions surrounding the doubled self and self-reflection, it also presents a weirdly disorientating and decidedly unheimlich perspective for anyone entering the room, especially when you notice through the window the looming—and also doubly reflected—presence of the artist’s sculpture Self (2016) outside in the garden. Thanks to the Art Fund, this Wallinger-height bronze columnar letter “I” is to be a permanent al-fresco fixture at the museum.



Mark Wallinger: Self Reflection at the Freud Museum

All these subjects and much more were given an illuminating airing at the beginning of the week in a sparky conversation between Wallinger and Fiona Bradley, the director of the Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. The packed audience included Elisabeth Murdoch, whose Freelands Foundation has just awarded the Fruitmarket its inaugural £100,000 Freelands Award to mount a major show of Jacqueline Donachie. But—as Dr Freud would certainly agree—it is the nature of live talks that surprises can spontaneously emerge, and this certainly happened when one audience member quizzed Wallinger about the erotic, bordello connotations of the mirrored ceiling, stating that he was speaking as an architect who had become familiar with mirrored ceilings “while working on a suburban brothel”. There were a few ripples of nervous laughter before the interlocutor added that it was his job to convert the building into a new function and remove, rather than install, its reflective surfaces. Ego and id, indeed.

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The Whitney Museum is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the American painter Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) with an evening symposium on his legacy. Among the speakers are the painter Christopher Wool, who studied under Pousette-Dart as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, Jennifer Powell, a senior curator at the museum and Patti Trimble, a former studio assistant of the artist’s. The talk takes places on 29 September.The event will open with a short film that documents the cleaning and conservation of Pousette-Dart’s triptych Presence, Healing Circles (1973-74), which was undertaken by the artist’s foundation this past summer. The painting was originally commissioned for the North Central Bronx Hospital by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which operates the city’s public medical centres.



Richard Pousette-Dart’s Presence, Healing Circles (1973-74) at the Gouverneur Health care centre in New York in 2016

Thomas Messer, then the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, sat on the corporation’s art advisory board and approached Pousette-Dart with the project. The artist originally made two works for the hospital and allowed administrators to choose which they wanted. (The other painting, titled Radiance, is now in a private collection.) Presence, Healing Circles was then on show in the Bronx hospital lobby for more than 40 years, across the way from a work by Helen Frankenthaler. Since the conservation project, it has been installed at the Gouverneur Healthcare centre in lower Manhattan.



Nina Leen’s photograph of he “Irascibles” for Life magazine, 24 November 1950. Pousette-Dart is in the middle row, at far left, with his hand in his pocket

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Seeing what kind of art curators choose to live with is like finding out where chefs go to dinner. They may not make the obvious or fashionable choice, but they usually have a good reason. Next month, Christie’s is due to sell works from the eclectic collection of Everett Fahy, the former curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the former director of the Frick Collection in New York. The 46 paintings, works on paper and objects will lead Christie’s Old Masters sale on 26 October in New York.

Some of the works, which span the 14th to the 20th centuries, were gifts Fahy received from famous friends. The socialite Brooke Astor gave him a Chinese carved jade disc from the late 19th century (est $1,000-$1,500). The sale’s top lot is a fragment of an early 14th-century panel painting of Saint Peter attributed to the Circle of Duccio Di Buoninsegna (est $150,000-$250,000). The tempera and gold painting was one of several gifts from Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Fahy’s mentor and predecessor as chairman of European paintings at the Met.





All told, the collection is expected to make $353,800 to $554,400. Some small sculptures and drawings carry estimates as low as $400. Specialists hope that the modest price points and eclectic mix of objects will appeal to collectors in town for the first New York edition of the European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) (22-26 October). Fahy “has listed a significant portion of the collection with no reserve, so it’s an opportunity to have wildly low prices achieved for really amazing things,” says the specialist Emma Kronman.Fahy worked as a consultant to the Christie’s Old Masters department after he left the Met in 2009. He lived with his collection in a Mark Hampton-designed apartment on New York’s Upper West Side until recently, when ill health caused him to downsize and move closer to his family.

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The French artist Pierre Huyghe has won the $100,000 Nasher Prize, the world’s largest award for sculpture, given out by the Nasher Sculpture Centre in Dallas. The jury made up of curators and artists—including Nicholas Serota, Okwui Enwezor, Phyllida Barlow, Huma Bhabba, Pablo León de la Barra—selected Huyghe from a list of 150 nominees.Long recognised as one of the key representatives of “relational aesthetics”, a term coined by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to describe art that often involves creating a shared social experience, Huyghe’s work encompass disciplines such as cinema, music, theater and sculpture. Many of his best known piece incorporate living elements like bees, crabs, dogs and microorganisms and immaterial elements such as fog, light, and scents.



Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011-12), living entities and inanimate things, made or not made



Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask) (2014), film, colour, sound



Pierre Huyghe, A Forest of Lines (July 2008), event, Sydney Opera House, film, colour, sound (Image: Paul Green)

The work of this “very enigmatic” artist, says Okwui Enwezor, “extends far beyond any tidy definition of sculpture”. The Nasher’s director Jeremy Strick agrees: “[Huyghe’s] expansive view of sculpture so wonderfully embodies the goal of the Nasher Prize, which is to champion the greatest artistic minds of our time.”In addition to the prize money, the artist will also receive an award especially designed by Renzo Piano, the architect of the Nasher Sculpture Center, during a ceremony in Dallas on 1 April 2017. It does not, however, come with a special commission or exhibition. The prize was launched last year and given to the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. The presenting sponsor is JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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Bedwyr Williams says The Gulch, his first solo show in a London institution, will be full of “theatrical moments” and “little embarrassments”. The Welsh artist has plotted an assault course of six immersive environments to lead visitors through the 90m-long, 6m-high sweep of the Barbican’s Curve gallery.Navigating absurd set pieces including a smugglers’ cove, an intimidating boardroom and a rocky ravine, “the audience will become performers”, Williams says. Contemporary art, he adds, also has a funny side. The exhibition is supported by Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation.

Were you daunted by the Curve as an exhibition space?
It could be even longer or even taller, I’d be happy with that. Anything that allows me to make installations that are theatrical in terms of scale. For making a quest-type exhibition or a little journey, it was perfect. It’s about the same height as a theatre set.

The exhibition has a series of tricks in store for visitors.
It’s that kind of space because when you enter you can’t see the end of it. It makes you think about missing out on things. It’s not a shared experience kind of room. If a man has a heart attack halfway along it, the people at the beginning don’t know. They see the paramedics running and they don’t see him collapse. It’s a good space to goof around with a linear narrative.

What does the title mean?
A gulch is a dried-out crevasse or ravine. In the Beano there used to be a character called Baby Face Finlayson and he lived in Vulture Gulch, so it’s more of an American or an Australian term. For me the Curve, because it’s high-sided, is a kind of ravine. I like the sound of it.

You’re also writing and performing an audio walk for the Barbican centre outside the gallery.
There’s going to be dummy replicas of laptops and smartphones attached to the tables, maybe 100 of them, and you’ll be able to plug your headphones in. It will be a mix of field recordings using the format of a conventional audioguide and filling it with nonsense. It’ll be something to do with the people who hot-desk here, imagining what the water cooler conversations between them would be. I’ve always been fascinated with the Barbican. When I was a kid in the 80s all art centres looked like this—low lighting, people padding around in a very serious manner. It’s pregnant with potential.

Why did you become an artist?
Being an artist and working across media, you can pretty much have a stab at anything. I write, I take photographs, I draw and perform and I collaborate with people who do all those things. But even though you can do anything, artists still follow a lot of conventions. Young artists still make little shows with plinths and there’s a way of looking at these things. I’m not interested in doing that and that’s why I like working with theatre makers. I like the artifice of the theatre. People still ask me to make more of these immersive things, but I’m not doing it for any academic reason. I liked model trains as a kid and I like making miniature landscapes.

Was it always your intention to introduce comedy to contemporary art?
Even when I was 18 doing a foundation course in north Wales I remember thinking it was daft that it’s all so serious. How come art is allowed to be sad but not funny? You do a performance and in an art situation as opposed to a comedy club people would put up with anything. I can’t help but mock that freedom. The art world is very pompous, so it’s completely ripe for it.

How do you define the British sense of humour?
I think the British sense of humour is very special. When I’ve spent extended times overseas it’s the thing I miss the most. It’s fatalistic and self-deprecating, a little bit pompous but able to laugh at itself. There’s a kind of disquiet in Britain all the time, like a really rowdy pub just waiting to boil over.

You represented Wales at the Venice Biennale. What does Welshness mean to you?
I don’t reference it in my work to make any political point but I love having that take on being British. I learnt English when I was five and think it’s amazing how much you can do with it as a language. I can’t imagine making work without using language.

Has Brexit had any impact on your work?
Maybe. I’m making a new work for Artes Mundi in Cardiff about a fictional city built in the mountains in mid-Wales. It’s hard not to think about what’s happening. I think it’s actually quite an exciting time to be an artist, also because I don’t live in London. Apocalyptic films always start in the city and then flee to the countryside. It’s when you get into the ‘burbs that you get the true horror of it. Observing Brexit from north Wales has been quite weird. It would have been depressing in London as well but at least you can go for tapas or something.

Do you prefer to work away from London?
Yes, it suits me. Also as I’ve got older, I think I’ve found a way of working that gets all my little interests together. That’s satisfying because then I can concentrate on making [video installations] as good as I can, instead of agonising about the form of it.

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Londoners and art world professionals gave the thumbs up for David Shrigley’s new public art commission standing on the Fourth Plinth, which was unveiled today in Trafalgar Square in the heart of London (29 September). The seven-metre-high piece, entitled Really Good, is an outlandishly long thumb cast in bronze with the same dark patina as the other classic statues in the square.Shrigley, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013, hopes that the gesture will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things considered “bad, such as the economy, the weather and society will benefit from a change of consensus towards positivity”, he says.

Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, welcomed the new addition. “It’s very impressive, I can see it from my office window,” he says. Earlier this year, he told The Art Newspaper that “the Fourth Plinth is a brilliant way to make art connect with contemporary people.”

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Sunset at Playas Avellanas, Costa Rica