A beautiful new art center opened on a Friday evening last month. 2,000 people attended the opening. The building was designed by a major architecture firm. There’s talk of gentrification. And it’s in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Lusanga is a remote town 650 kilometers southeast of the DRC’s capital. It was established in 1911 as Leverville, a Dutch concession to the British Lever Brothers company for a forced labor palm oil plantation. By the 1930s, with 67,800 square kilometers of plantations in the Congo, Lever Brothers became Unilever, a modern multinational corporation. After decades of exploitation, and after two civil wars in the DRC, Unilever ended operations in the region and left an economic vacuum where families live on less than a dollar per day laboring on cacao plantations.

The profits from this kind of capitalism funded the philanthropy of the Lever Brothers and later Unilever, which most notably supported a series of major commissions (including Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, and Ólafur Elíasson) for the Tate Modern. Corporate wealth was extracted from plantations, with the exploitation of human labor, and packaged as philanthropy for the cultivation of arts and culture somewhere else.

The new art center in Lusanga is a joint initiative of the Amsterdam-based Institute for Human Activities (IHA) and the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs De Plantation Congolaise (the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, or CATPC). Called the Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality (LIRCAEI), the new white cube in the Congo aims to develop opportunities for plantation workers to buy back their own land and to establish a post-colonial economy.

The opening of LIRCAEI followed an exhibition of works by CATPC at SculptureCenter in New York of sculptures cast in raw cacao, though none of the artists had ever tasted the chocolate that multinational corporations manufacture from their plantations. From previous exhibitions in Germany, England, and the Netherlands, and on IHA’s website, editions of the sculptures have been sold to support CATPC artists and to purchase land for community-owned fruit, palm, and cacao farms, which should subsequently fund more local economic development.

On the site of the former Unilever plantation, the new LIRCAEI building was designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the renowned Dutch architectural firm founded by Rem Koolhaas. Its inaugural exhibition, The Repatriation of the White Cube, featured cacao sculptures and works in other media by CATPC, and works by international artists including Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, and Carsten Höller, interestingly, a previous recipient of the Unilever Series commission.

Renzo Martens, the founder of IHA, describes:

“We consider the White Cube to be the apex of the art world: it is a metaphor. The act of bringing back—establishing this quintessential trope on the site of the worn-out plantations—is meant to render visible the abject inequality sustaining contemporary art. This gesture is about site specificity. It might be understood as recontextualizing the global art apparatus in the setting that has historically underwritten its development.”

LIRCAEI’s opening marks the beginning of a five-year program to acquire land and create a sustainable economic model throughout the Congo. If institutional critique exposes exploitation and reverses cultural appropriation, it might initiate some form of gentrification with artistic production, modern architecture, and the attention of the international art world supporting the development of a post-plantation economy.

Learn more at Institute for Human Activities, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs De Plantation Congolaise, and Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality.

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It has been a superlative auction season in New York with sales of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary art totaling more than $2 billion. Christie’s reported a decline from last November with sales of $968 million, and Sotheby’s increased to $978 million notwithstanding a poor third quarter and concern about the margins on its $500 million guarantee for the Taubman collection.

The bigger news is the November 9 evening sale of Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couché (Reclining Nude). Christie’s sold the work for $170.4 million, setting a record for Modigliani and making it the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction. The painting came from a private collection in Switzerland and has only been on public exhibition twice during the last 45 years. Unfortunately, it may be some time again before it is exhibited.

Nu Couché was likely first shown at Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in 1917. That was Modigliani’s only solo exhibition, and it was brief. The nudes were censored and the show was closed by the police. Nu Couché reappeared at Galerie Bing & Cie in Paris in 1925 and at the Venice Biennale in 1930, and was acquired by Gianni Mattioli in 1949. Mattioli loaned the work to museums frequently through the 1950s. His daughter, the art historian Laura Mattioli, inherited his collection in 1977 and is rumored to be the anonymous consigner of Nu Couché.

The painting, with an estimate of $100 million, was acquired last week with a phone bid by Liu Yiqian for $170.4 million. The Chinese billionaire and his wife, Wang Wei, have built a collection of more than 2,300 works for the Long Museum in Shanghai. The couple founded the Long Museum and Wei is its director. With locations in Pudong and West Bund, it is the largest private museum in China.

Yiqian is best (or worst) known for drinking from a 500-year-old Ming dynasty cup that he acquired at auction for $36 million and charged to his AmEx (the rewards points!) last year. He is also known to take advantage of free trade zones. Importing art to mainland China incurs VAT and customs duties from 17 to 34 percent, so collectors and dealers store works in freeports, which are not subject to import or transaction taxes. Yiqian and a museum spokesperson have stated that Nu Couché will be shown at the Long Museum in 2017, but a vault in Le Freeport West Bund is almost certainly its next destination.

If Nu Couché arrives at the Long Museum, a public exhibition is uncertain. It was censored by French police in 1917 and by American media in 2015. Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, and CNN blurred images of the painting, and Financial Times covered it with black rectangles. Censorship is very likely in China where authorities regularly remove works or close exhibitions that they deem “pornographic” or politically sensitive, even in private museums and galleries.

Perhaps the Long Museum, now with increased international attention, will extend its cultural influence to ensure that Nu Couché returns to public exhibition after so long in private collections.

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In 1971, Yoko Ono placed ads in the Village Voice and The New York Times announcing The Museum of Modern [F]art, her one-woman show at MoMA. The 100-page exhibition catalogue included an image of Yoko Ono in MoMA’s sculpture garden with a jar of flies, which were to be released into the city and then photographed as they buzzed across New York.

When visitors arrived for the exhibition, from December 1 to 15, 1971, a sign at the entrance invited them to track the flies, which had already dispersed, and a handwritten note on the museum’s ticket counter advised, “This Is Not Here.” In fact, it wasn’t. Notwithstanding newspaper ads, the catalogue, and MoMA visitors who gave their opinions about the show, the exhibition was conceptual and hadn’t happened at all.  

Today, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 actually opened at MoMA. For real. It’s official. There are 125 objects in the museum’s sixth-floor galleries. Critics of MoMA’s Björk or Marina Abramović exhibitions may take pause. Yoko Ono will be popular with visitors, but it’s art world approved with solid content. Ono’s work has early connections to Fluxus, and her career beyond that has included experimental film, instruction-based text works, participatory installations, and performance art. She’s also wonderful on Twitter.

Among the films presented, Cut Piece is requisite in contemporary art history courses. In the 1964 performance (MoMA is showing the film from a 1965 performance), Ono asks visitors to cut away pieces of her clothing while she sits still on a stage.

Also from 1964, the typewritten/handwritten contents of Grapefruit are displayed, page-by-page, on a very long wall. The book of instructions includes entries such as “Listen to the sound of the earth turning,” and “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.” Ono’s additional instructions were to “Burn this book after you’ve read it,” and John Lennon added, “This is the greatest book I’ve ever burned.” The sequel, Acorn, was published in 2013.

The exhibition also includes facsimiles of original installations including Painting to be Stepped On (1960/61), Bag Piece (1964), and Apple (1966). Painting to Be Stepped On is not only a title, but also an instruction, and Bag Piece invites visitors to get into a black cloth bag while others look on. These installations are participatory and confound the “do not touch” custom of art museums. Apple is actually an apple, on a plexiglas pedestal with a brass plaque, which will be left to decompose until it is a seed again.

In a recent interview for ARTnews, Yoko Ono summed up this exhibition and explicated the significance of her conceptual work:

“There was a conceptual show,” she said, “and then there’s a reality that came from it a long time later”—referring to the current, real-life exhibition at MoMA. “And likewise,” she continued, “I think that we’re all thinking of having world peace, and I’m sure that’s going to happen, in reality. What I was doing in my work was not just showing how great I am as an artist or something. I was showing how you can deal with life. If you think about it conceptually, it can happen later.”

Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 draws from MoMA’s 2008 acquisition of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection.

The exhibition continues through September 7, 2015.

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From March 8 through June 7, the Museum of Modern Art presents a mid-career retrospective of work by Björk. The eponymous exhibition examines the Icelandic singer’s career with a custom-built pavilion and a specially developed augmented audio guide for an immersive visitor experience.

The exhibition begins in MoMA’s atrium lobby with four musical instruments that were created for Björk’s Biophilia album. On a mezzanine above, one of two installation spaces loops a retrospective of 32 music videos spanning eight albums. The other space replicates the interior of an Icelandic cave and shows the MoMA-commissioned video installation for Black Lake from the just-released Vulnicura album.

On the third floor, a series of galleries for each of Björk’s solo albums (except Vulnicura) is entitled Songlines. Each gallery contains vitrines with personal journals, video set pieces, and costumes. The location-based audio guide layers Björk’s music with narrative text from The Triumph of the Heart by the Icelandic poet Sjón for an allegorical rather than didactic experience. Reportedly the audio is successive, imposing a linear progression through each chapter and gallery.

Fans of Björk, and of multimedia art experiences, will remember that the 2011 album Biophilia launched with an iPhone app. The interactive album explores nature, music, and technology with mesmerizing imagery and musical scoring. In 2014, Biophilia became the first app to be acquired for MoMA’s permanent collection.

Even before it opened to the public, Björk received negative reviews from almost every arts writer in New York with criticism for MoMA’s installation and curatorial program. However, Björk is a prodigious composer, singer, producer, and artist, so we predict the exhibition will be a popular and fascinating experience.

Björk was curated by MoMA’s Klaus Biesenbach and is sponsored by Volkswagen. MoMA’s next eccentric celebrity/musician/artist exhibition will be a retrospective of works by Yoko Ono, opening in May. And Björk’s ex-partner, Matthew Barney, will have an exhibition at MOCA in September.

March 25, 2015 update:  Now they’re calling it Björkgate and critics have more to say.

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In Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ólafur Elíasson has transformed the museum’s South Wing into a rocky river landscape with a site-specific installation combining nature, architecture, and art.

Louisiana, along the Øresund about 25 miles north of Copenhagen, is renowned for its collection of modern and contemporary art as well as for its campus of Danish modernist architecture. The complex of glass-walled pavilions and low-profile buildings fits elegantly into the natural landscape, incorporating sculpture gardens and views onto the sea.

For his site-specific installation at Louisiana, Ólafur Elíasson has filled the museum’s South Wing with 180 tons of Icelandic rocks to create a naturalistic terrain, complete with a river of running water.

Louisiana is deferential to its Øresund landscape, but also obscures it with buildings and gardens. Elíasson’s installation suggests the dirt and rocks that were there before, and still are, underneath the museum’s floors. Visitors step across rocks and the small river that flows through the galleries, and the indoors and outdoors become reversed so that the building contains a landscape rather than the inverse. It is land art, on some scale, and is simultaneously representational and real.

Riverbed opened on August 20 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and runs through April 1, 2015. http://en.louisiana.dk/exhibition/olafur-eliasson

Ólafur Elíasson’s works since the early 1990s have frequently joined science, technology, and art for large-scale installations that immerse visitors into singular haptic experiences of natural elements.

In 2003, Elíasson created The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern as part of the prestigious and popular Unilever Series. A large circular disk emitted orange light through a haze of mist, and a huge mirror covered the ceiling of the hall to reflect the light as well as the relatively small figures of visitors below. Some two million people visited the installation over six months to bask in the artificial sun.

With a commission by the Public Art Fund and simultaneous exhibitions at MoMA and MoMA PS1 in 2008, Elíasson installed New York City Waterfalls with four towers of scaffolds and pipes along the East River. The towers, from 90 to 120 feet in height, took up water from the river and let it cascade back as an obviously mechanical version of a natural phenomenon.

In 2011, Elíasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama was installed on top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, Denmark. The work is a 490-foot circular corridor made of glass in every color of the spectrum. As visitors walk through the structure, they experience views across the city in a transition of colors depending on their location. It is illuminated from within at night, and provides constantly changing sensory experiences.

Ólafur Elíasson’s installations extend aesthetics to replicate the sublime qualities of nature. Perhaps owing to his upbringing in Denmark and Iceland, where there are stunning landscapes and particular relationships light, Elíasson’s recent works have even become ecological. One of them – Little Sun – is actually a humanitarian project to provide lights to the 1.2 billion people in the world who have no access to electricity. www.littlesun.com

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