Twenty-five years ago a young artist started an independent art space in a modest house in a village in Yogyakarta. The arrival of the Cemeti Modern Art Gallery is one of the most important moments in the history of contemporary art in Indonesia but, as Alia Swastika notes, starting an independent art initiative was not easy during the authoritarian political regime of the late 1980s. Read more…
Image: Cemeti Art House, Indonesia

Ten years ago, on 19 March 2003, the US-led coalition force launched its second invasion of Iraq – an event that has had a profound effect on the country's archeology and museums as well as on its 34 million people. Museums have been ransacked, archeological sites plundered and the remains of the ancient city of Babylon have been damaged and contaminated by military action. Read more…
Image: US gunship over the Great Ziggurat of Ur

Japanese architect Toyo Ito has been awarded this year's prestigious Pritzker Prize. Along with Tadao Ando, the 1995 Pritzker laureate, Ito is a superstar of Japanese architecture. He is best known for his 2001 Sendai Mediatheque, a seven-story glass box that distills a series of complex technical break thoughs in its spare, even-keeled finish. His largest and most ambitious project, the 620,000 square-foot Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, is under construction in Taiwan and scheduled to open next year.
Images: Toyo Ito, 2013 Pritzker Prize laureate and his Sendai Mediatheque

Billy Apple, Phil Dadson and Jae Hoon Lee are represented in 21st-Century Collecting at Wellington's Adam Art Gallery. Curated by Christina Barton, the exhibition raises questions about contemporary art practice and the challenges facing those who are its custodians.

Thomas McEvilley died on March 3 at Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York from complications from cancer. As one of the most influential and prolific commentators on the art of the late twentieth century he will be widely missed. Few art critics have arrived on the scene more spectacularly than McEvilley did with ‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief’, his relentless and withering attack on MoMa’s major exhibition, ‘Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art” in the November 1985 issue of Artforum. If postmodernism’s brief was the dismantling of Eurocentric formalism, McEvilley became its leading spokesperson more or less overnight. Though an academic—he taught art history at Rice University in Houston for over 30 years and subsequently established the MFA program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York—his intellectual allegiance was less to the Academy than to the City, New York where he lived.

That said, it was McEvilley’s training in Classical Philology that initially distinguished him from his fellow art critics and again recently, with the publication of his book on and translations of the poetry of Sappho (2008) and his magnum opus The Shape of Ancient Thought, A Comparative Study of Greek and Indian Philosophy (2002). This lifelong command of such disparate fields of knowledge, is a mark of extraordinary capaciousness of his mind. The independence and originality of his insights into the larger issues of modern and contemporary art are matched by those to be found in his numerous studies of individual artists, as various as Marcel Broodthaers, Denis Oppenheim, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Leon Golub,  and Kara Walker.

McEvilley had friends and readers in New Zealand. A contributor to the first issue of Midwest, he was keynote speaker at the 1994 Wellington International Arts Festival Under Capricorn conference, Is Art a European Idea?, and more recently he wrote an  essay for The Brush of All Things, the catalogue of Max Gimblett’s 2004 retrospective at the Auckland Art Gallery. He was a close contemporary and a good friend of mine; I will miss the warmth and depth of his intelligence. 

Wystan Curnow.
Image: Thomas McEvilley reading from Sappho

Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature continues this week at Starkwhite.

Lehmann Maupin is the latest international arrival on Hong Kong's burgeoning gallery scene joining Gagosian, White Cube and Galerie Perrotin. The Arts Newspaper reports on how things are panning out for galleries chasing the Chinese Dragon. Read more…

The artist list has been announced for Massimiliano Gioni's Venice Biennale exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace. You can see the full list of artists here for which for the first time includes a New Zealand artist.
Image: Massimiliano Gioni curator of The Encyclopedic Palace, which includes Simon Denny who is represented in New Zealand by Michael Lett

Love it or hate it, the Archibald Prize is a permanent fixture on Sydney's exhibition calendar. Hosted by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the $75,000 portrait prize attracts hundreds of entries from artists and, according to former AGNSW director Edmund Capon, attracts at least 150,000 fee-paying visitors a year, provides a financial windfall for the gallery and generates a huge amount of priceless press. But as the annual Archibald Prize-bashing begins with calls for it to be killed off, or at least changed, the famously unpredictable artbagger is singing off a new song sheet. “If it was judged by critics or curators it would have been deceased a long time ago,” says Capon. “It would have died up its own backside.”
Image: 2012 Archibald Prize winner Tim Storier with his dog Smudge

Last week the LA art world was debating the pros and cons of a possible merger between LA MOCA and LACMA. Now the NYT reports the financially-troubled museum may be close to working out a five year agreement with the National Gallery of Art in Washington to collaborate on programming, research and exhibitions. Any agreement would not include financial or fundraising assistance, leaving MOCA's fiscal problems unsolved, but an agreement could help lift its fundraising efforts and ward off a merger with LACMA.

The  approach to the National Gallery was made by Eli Broad, the billionaire collector who bailed out MOCA in 2008. He is reported to have a special interest in the success of MOCA because he is building his own museum right across the street. For the moment he appears to have derailed the possibility of a merger with LACMA. Read more…
Image: The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art

For the sixth consecutive year, the British Museum was the most visited attraction in the UK with 5.6 million visitors. The Tate Modern took second place with 5.3 million visitors, up by 9% on the previous year with a large share of the increase down to Damien Hirst. His exhibition became the best-attended solo show and second-most visited exhibition in the Tate Modern's history.

Following his Gangnam-style video, Ai Weiwei has written 9 metal-tinged tracks for his recording debut, with music by rock musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a friend who was questioned during the artist's 2011 detention. Two of the tracks are devoted to the blind activist Chen Guangcheng and another track is titled Climbing over the Wall, a reference to China's great firewall.

Ai told reuters that the idea for the album came when he was held in detention. “All I could sing was Chinese People's Liberation Army songs,” he said. “After that I thought when I'm out I'd like to do something related to music.” He also says Elton John has been an inspiration for making his own album and that he is already at work on a second album that is closer to John's oeuvre.
Image: Ai Weiwei

IMA Director Robert Leonard is curating an exhibition for Starkwhite to coincide with the opening of the Auckland Triennial in May. Titled Bazinga!—the notorious catchphrase of Dr Sheldon Cooper from the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory—the show will explore a nerd sensibility in recent Australian art. It will feature work that touches on science (especially astrophysics) and science fiction (particularly Star Trek); mathematics and statistics; technology, computers, computer games, and the internet; and obsessive fandom, autistic behaviour, and inane pranks. The artists are Rebecca Baumann, Botborg, Antoinette J. Citizen, Gabrielle de Vietri, Danielle Freakley, Daniel McKewen, Ross Manning, Grant Stevens, and Stuart Ringholt. Bazinga! opens Saturday 11 May at 6pm, with a video/sound-feedback performance by Botborg, and runs until 8 June.
Image: Grant Stevens, Matter (2007), digital video

Australian gallerist Barry Keldoulis has been appointed CEO and Group Fairs Director of Art Fairs Australia Pty, the company behind the new Sydney Contemporary art fair and the Melbourne Art fair. Keldoulis takes up the reins from Francesca Valmorbida who laid the foundations for Sydney Contemporary, which launches in September.
Image: Barry Keldoulis

Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature continues this week at Starkwhite.
Image: Jin Jiangbo's interactive projection Rules of Nature is presented in association with the Auckland Arts Festival 2013

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced a plan to take over the financially troubled LA MOCA, but it may require the approval of billionaire collector Eli Broad. His $30m bailout of MOCA in 2008 was on condition that it may not be acquired by another museum within 100 miles within the next 10 years. You can read the merger proposal here.

Massimiliano Gioni and Hans Ulrich Obrist teamed up recently at the New Museum to discuss do it, the ongoing curatorial project of instructions by artists for artworks exhibited as manuals that began in Paris in 1993 as a conversation between Obrist and artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. “I think it's Richard Hamilton who once told me that we mainly remember exhibitions that invent new rules of the game,” Obrist said on the panel. “And that's what Boltanski and Lavier and I said at the cafe, that we wanted to invent new rules.” Read more…

As the Armory Show prepares to launch its centennial edition in New York this week, Jerry Saltz revisits the 1913 Armory Show and the birth of modern America. Read more…
Image: 2013 edition of The Armory Show

Mexican artist Hector Zamora has recently completed the installation of Muegano, a multi-faceted structure hovering above a lake in Christchurch's Botanical Gardens. Originally commissioned for the 6th SCAPE Public Art Biennial in 2010, the installation of the work was postponed in 2011 after Christchurch was rocked by a devastating series of earthquakes that left much of the city and its architectural heritage in ruins. Having survived the 1986 Mexico earthquake, Zamora was sensitive to how Christchurch people might feel about the sculpture's tumbled appearance, but with the passing of time the work can now function as he intended: as a comment on inner city living and urban density.
Image: Hector Zamora's Muegano, Christchurch Botanic Gardens

Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature opens at Starkwhite on Thursday at 6pm. Drawing on the ancient tradition of Chinese ink and wash paintings and employing interface software, his shanshui-inspired landscape is formed and re-formed in response to interactions by viewers. Presented in association with the Auckland Arts Festival 2013, Rules of Nature runs to 4 April.
Image: Jin Jiangbo's interactive projection at the 1012 Guangzhou Triennial

The 10th edition of Europe's nomadic biennial, Manifesta, will be hosted by the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The biennial, which changes its location every edition, was launched shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall to encourage artistic dialogue between countries formerly divided by the Iron Curtain. Manifesta in 2014 will be the first edition to take place in an eastern European country.
Image: Hermitage

The Getty says the second Pacific Standard Time will explore the artistic connections between Los Angeles and Latin America. “Our city has had deep roots in Latin America, making it a nexus  of cultural creativity between North and South.” says Getty President and CEO Jim Cunro. Los Angeles and Latin America follows the first edition of Pacific Standard Time, which brought together dozens of museums to celebrate the historically under-recognised art of Southern California from 1945 to 1980.
Image: The first edition of Pacific Standard Time included an exhibition of Chicano performance and conceptual art group Asco at LACMA

Billy Apple is represented in Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New at Moeller Fine Art, New York. The exhibition is a homage to pioneering galleist Howard Wise and features work by Apple, Christo, Nam June Paik, George Rickey and others.
Image: Billy Apple, Unidentified Fluorescent Object (UFO), 1967

The Museum of Modern Art is calling on its network of artists, architects and designers to help rebuild Rockaway Beach, which is struggling to recover after being hit by Hurricane Sandy. “We are asking artists, architects, designers and urban planners to present ideas for creating social spaces, new housing models, urban interventions and other ideas related to rebuilding and protecting the shoreline,” says MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach.

Twenty five selected proposals will be presented publicly in the press, social media and on site in a series of presentations organised by MoMA in its temporary relief and cultural VW Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach during April.
Image: Post-Hurricane Sandy Rockaway Beach

Image: installation view of Martin Basher's current exhibition at Starkwhite

Architect Andrew Burns says his prize-winning entry in the inaugural Fugitive Structures architecture competition has an ambiguous presence between architecture and art object and transforms an ordinary rose apple hedge into a thing of beauty. He hopes his black box will become a sanctuary of quiet contemplation for visitors to Gene Sherman's Contemporary Art Foundation over the next six months.

Launched in Sydney by Sherman in partnership with BCN Architecture, the brief for the $10,000 prize was to create an inspiring architectural space on a 20 square meter courtyard site, with a three-metre height restriction – dimensions that allowed the temporary structure to slip under the radar of the local council. She came up with the idea for the award after visiting the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London's  Kensington Gardens. Each year the Serpentine commissions an architect to create a temporary pavilion in the grounds near the Gallery.
Image: Crescent House, Andrew Burns' prize-winning Fugitive Structures pavilion 

Image: Ralph Hotere, Black Painting (1964)

A new book out next week offers unedited transcripts from Calvin Tompkins' interviews with Marcel Duchamp ahead of a major profile in The New Yorker that ran the following year. Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (Badlands limited/DAP) comes out on the centenary of the first readymade Bicycle Wheel, and the debut of Nude Descending a Staircase at the inaugural Armory Show in New York. Read more…

Recently The Village Voice published a piece on the influence of big money on art today – how it affects the way art is made, understood and ultimately experienced. Read more…
Image: artwork by William Powhida from The Village Voice

Martin Basher's exhibition continues at Starkwhite this week through to 2 March. This link takes you to our press release and installation views.

The Getty Research Institute has released a video on legendary curator Harald Szeemann. You can view the video here.
Image: Harald Szeemann

Construction is underway on Bosco Verticale, the twin tree-clad apartment buildings in Milan that will the be world's first ever vertical forest. In addition to adding an eye-catching feature, the buildings' 900 trees along with a variety of shrubs and plants, are meant to absorb CO2 and particles from Milan's notoriously dirty air, shield radiation, produce both humidity and oxygen, filter noise pollution and provide energy saving shade to each of the towers' apartment units. The buildings will also have wind and solar systems, along with greywater recycling systems to help irrigate the greenery on the buildings' cantilevered balconies, and a team of in-house horticulturalists to tend to the trees, the tallest of which will grow to a maximum height of 30 feet.
Image: architectural renderings of  Stefano Boeri's Bosco Verticale, Milan

Grant Stevens' Supermassive is showing L.A. Louver to 23 February. You can read an Los Angeles Times review of his exhibition here.

On the eve of their exhibition at Melbourne's Anna Schwartz Gallery, AES+F spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald about art-making in post-Pussy Riot Russia. Read more…
Image: figure from AES+F's Angels-Demons series

Martin Basher's exhibition continues at Starkwhite this week through to 2 March. This link takes you to our press release and installation views.
Image: installation view of Martin Basher's current exhibition

This year the Chinese New Year falls on February 10 and Starkwhite celebrates the start of year of the snake with Shangahi-based artist Jin Jiangbo who is in Auckland to oversee the installation of an exhibition of interactive works, which opens on 7 March as part of the visual arts programme of the Auckland Festival of Arts.

Alicia Frankovich presents a new performance tonight at Berlin's Galerie Michael Janssen. The missing action takes place between 18:00 and 20:00 at the opening of Assaf Gruber's exhibition Every Corner of the Soul.

The Mendel Art Gallery and future Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan has announced the appointment of former Power Plant director Gregory Burke as director and chief executive. Read more…