Trevor Paglen. Code Names of the Surveillance State, 2014. Installation view: Metro Pictures, New York.
Trevor Paglen uncovers government code names, El Anatsui manipulates newspaper printing plates, David Altmejd has a retrospective in France, and more in this week’s roundup.
- In Code Names of the Surveillance State, now on view at Metro Pictures (New York, NY), artist Trevor Paglen projects some 4,000 program code names from the National Security Agency and the Government Communications Headquarters. The four-wall installation produces “endlessly scrolling” columns of “deliberately nonsensical” titles. Closes December 20.
- New works by El Anatsui are on view at Mnuchin Gallery (New York, NY). Anatsui presents his large-scale wall hangings, as well as a new body of work called Metas in which he incorporates newspaper printing plates. Read more about the show in ARTnews and the New York Observer. Metas closes December 13.
- On the occasion of Paper Music: A Ciné Concert at Carnegie Hall—a one-night project by ongoing collaborators William Kentridge and Phillip Miller—Marian Goodman Gallery (New York, NY) has organized an exhibition of Kentridge films featuring music by Miller. Fifty-two small framed drawings and a flip book are also on view. Closes November 26.
- Organized by the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Flux is billed as the first French retrospective of David Altmejd’s work. “The exhibition takes the form of a work in its own right,” reads the museum website, “with creatures sometimes combining the anthropomorphic and the animal: half-vegetal, half-mineral hybrids that make play with the architecture of the museum as they spin out their arachnoid labyrinths.” Highlights include Altmejd’s monumental sculpture The Flux and The Puddle (2014). Closes February 1, 2015.
- “I think as an artist you have a fantastic position in the community because you have a lot of anonymity, a lot of privacy—most people do not recognise you,” said Jeff Koons in an interview for The Independent. “You move about the world very, very freely and you can look at things and not be distracted and at the same time you can participate and, hopefully, have some impact in the cultural environment.” Koons also discusses politics, Lady Gaga’s album cover, art collecting, and “mega prices.”
