Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Opens December 12

“My gallery is the world now,” declared Seth Siegelaub in 1969, three years after he shuttered the doors of his gallery on 56th Street in New York. It made a kind of sense to close the space. Siegelaub, born in the Bronx in 1941, had boundless energy, but not much of a gift for sales, and besides, the art he most championed in the late 1960s was in a process of (to borrow the word of his then-partner Lucy Lippard) dematerialization. Pop and minimalism had done their work, and art was beginning to take new, ephemeral forms: instructions, scores, actions, concepts. Siegelaub was not an artist. But as a dealer—a totally insufficient word to describe his activities, which were closer perhaps to what we would now call “curating”—Siegelaub provided the means and the mechanisms by which conceptualism could actually take place.

That happened, above all, through publications. Siegelaub’s great contribution to contemporary art was to make catalogues, mailings, posters, and other documents a venue for exhibition making—breaking apart, for the first time, the convention that a show had to occupy physical space. For his 1968 Xerox Book, a group show in the form of a publication, artists were given twenty-five pages to fill however they liked, and the physical constraints of the format (the dimensions of the pages, the monochrome ink) turned out to be no constraint at all. It was the ideas, not the images, that mattered now, and it was Siegelaub who provided the apparatus that made it possible. Its influence runs so deep that once, in a back-alley vintage shop far from the center of Tokyo, we actually found a Xerox Book T-shirt, emblazoned with Siegelaub’s name alongside Sol LeWitt’s and Lawrence Weiner’s. We still regret not buying it.

We’ve witnessed a mini-trend of exhibitions devoted to dealers, the best of which, surely, was this year’s Philadelphia Museum presentation of the indefatigable impressionist promoter Paul Durand-Ruel. And why shouldn’t dealers get shows from time to time? Dealers are the ones who take the most risks in their advocacy of the art of their time, and they usually have good collections to boot. But Siegelaub was much more than a dealer—a collector, a curator, a collaborator, he was all of these—and he would have found today’s class of frauds and flippers a breed apart. In 1971, he drafted the Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, a rider to contemporary art sales. The contract allowed artists to borrow back their own works and keep tabs on provenance, but its most important provision was this: if an artist sold her work on the primary market, and the collector then sold it onward, she would receive 15% of any profit. A similar droit de suite, which Siegelaub first conceived, is now the inalienable right of every artist in the European Union. In the US, you still need a lawyer.

 
Alex Bag
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Opens December 1

Oh, are we tired of the Miami moaning. Only in the art world could a week at the beach be considered a hardship. Art Basel’s Spanish-speaking sister remains the best fair on this side of the Atlantic, and before its sustained madness, Miami’s new space—still recovering from its divorce from MOCA NoMi—is mounting a highly promising retrospective of an iconic figure of the 1990s. Bag is producing a new site-specific installation for the ICA’s temporary home.

 
William Kentridge
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
Opens December 1

In November the South African draftsman/filmmaker opens his production of Lulu, Berg’s four-hour masterpiece of sex and atonality, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It’s a foretaste of this major show in Asia, which includes the full run of his Soho Eckstein animations and his monumental installation The Refusal of Time.

 
Recto Verso
Fondazione Prada, Milan
Opens December 4

We usually counsel discretion for those gazing at rear ends, but this is your chance to stare as long as you like at the neglected undersides of painting. Through a thematic survey of “back”-oriented works—stretching from trompe-l'œil compositions in 18th-century Flanders to medium-probing works by Llyn Foulkes and Giulio Paolino—the second show at Casa Miuccia aims to reveals what truths, hidden or forgotten, lie in reversal.

 
Robert Ryman: Real Light, 1958–2007
Dia Art Foundation, New York
Opens December 9

“‘Nothing’ is the force / That renovates the World —,” wrote Emily Dickinson. You feel that reestablishment if you look long enough at Ryman’s achromatic artworks, which extend from white-washed canvases and metal panels to three-dimensional gallery interventions. This is the first major retrospective that the Dia has mounted in Chelsea since losing its previous home, and it’s organized by one of the shrewdest young curators around: Courtney J. Martin, editor of a recent book on the critic Lawrence Alloway.

 
Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Opens December 15

New Yorkers have been spoiled recently for shows like this—the Met’s director, back in the day, was nicknamed “Tapestry Tom”—but this is the biggest west coast outing in decades for an art form that, for many European centuries, was more prestigious than painting. The fifteen immense, no-joke works, almost all of them from the Mobilier National (the successor to France’s royal collection), are after works by Raphael and Rubens—but the heroes here are the unnamed artisans of the Gobelins and other manufactories, fusing warp and weft into stupefying form.

 
Sabiha Rüştü Bozcalı
SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul
Opens December 15

It’s a statement and a welcome one: SALT has given Sabiha Bozcalı her first retrospective in a gesture for the much-needed recognition of female artists in Turkey. Bozcalı was one of the first women to portray twentieth-century industrialization in the country, and the exhibition captures her role in the cultural shaping of Turkey’s modern face.

 
Len Lye: Flora and Fauna
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand
Opens December 18

The late Kiwi artist has always had a small but devoted following among experimental film fans, but Lye has finally earned a larger stage for his work with a dedicated wing of this new museum. (The Len Lye Centre is the only institution in New Zealand dedicated to a single artist; it's a stunning thing, clad in wavy stainless steel.) The third exhibition in the four-month-old space explores the primordial origins of his art, weaving his interest in the natural world with his pioneering contributions in kinetic sculpture and experimental film.