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Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney
The New Zealand artist’s massive signature work was lauded at Venice Biennale and is the centrepiece of a powerful career survey at Sydney festival

It’s rare to be in the presence of a work of contemporary art that transcends itself; that stops being about a thing and instead becomes that thing. Context of course is inescapable – and when artists and audience share a cultural history, memory or knowledge, it can be vital to the back story of a piece. But I’m more interested these days in art that creates an experience that doesn’t first require an explanation.

International artists such as Olafur Eliasson, AES&F, Ann Lislegaard and Tacita Dean combine their interests and fascinations into works that are stunning visual experiences in and of themselves. Their works have depth too – there is a wealth of research and thinking that went into the creation – but the experience of the piece rises above it, in contrast to the over-conceptualised and aesthetically dead contemporary art that litters galleries around the world.

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SUNRISE: Ariana Reines’s January column

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield
A survey of late 20th-century artistic activism feels unfocused alongside the Chilean artist’s dark forest of prison cells

The rousing chorus of The Internationale can rarely have sounded as fragile or halting as it does on a frosty morning in the walled garden of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield. The Scottish artist Susan Philipsz recorded the revolutionaries’ anthem as a sotto voce solo in 1999 almost as a funerary farewell to the idea of full-throated protest. In the open air, in 2018, hearing Philipsz’s breathy voice eddying on a biting wind is like being stopped in your tracks by Wordsworth’s otherworldly Solitary Reaper. If it is a call to arms, it is a distinctly tentative one. The song instead acts as a plaintive summons to the park’s Bothy Gallery, where other lost traces of the direct action of the last century are preserved, as if of a different time and place altogether.

Revolt and Revolutions takes as its reference point 1977, the year of punk and the year in which the Yorkshire Sculpture Park was founded, as an outsiders’ outside space, by the visionary Peter Murray, who is still its director. Forty years on, the gallery presents a small and thoughtful expression of things that then seemed loud and urgent – experience looking back at innocence. In one room, 2011 Turner prize winner Martin Boyce’s Souvenir Placards are piled on the floor or propped against a wall, a mix and match of marchers’ slogans: “Ban the Bomb”, “Coal Not Dole”, “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay”. The signs are either discarded for good, or feasibly ready for action, depending on your point of view.

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In her portraits, installations and street art, Mexican textile artist Victoria Villasana applies colourful embroidery to pictures of artists, musicians and politicians. “I started using portraits of people who I consider visionaries,” she says, “as well as vintage photographs and cross-cultural portraits.” Inspired by expressionism, surrealism and pop art, she often chooses feminist icons such as Frida Kahlo, Nina Simone and Beyoncé. The use of embroidery is her nod to female empowerment. “Working with fabric makes me feel connected with an inner rebellious femininity. Embroidery is undervalued as just a ‘woman’s craft’ – but it’s something that reminds us of all those amazing women in our lives that nurture us.”

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Seagulls, ice-cream, chips and pebbles. Britons’ love for their beaches is captured in a new photography exhibition

• In pictures: The Great British Seaside

Over many decades the distinctive British beach experience – pebbles, wind, deckchairs, seagulls and chips – has come close to a national badge of pride for a stoic nation. This spring the salt-lashed island story of that love of our shoreline is to be celebrated through the work of four photographers: Martin Parr, Tony Ray-Jones, David Hurn and Simon Roberts.

From 23 March to 30 September the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, south-east London, will look at the key elements of a visit to the beach and show how our many coastal resorts have altered over the years.

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An exhibition of the best of British beach photography from the 1960s to the present, featuring work by Martin Parr, Tony Ray-Jones, Simon Roberts and David Hurn, is at The National Maritime Museum from 23 March to 30 September 2018.

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SUNRISE: Ariana Reines’s January column

Mudslides in California, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and airstrikes in Syria - the week’s biggest news stories captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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Fuck Theory on The Shape of Things at Park Avenue Armory

Star Tribune

An expert for Genoa prosecutors says that 20 of 60 works exhibited last year are fakes, but the owners of the works demand independent appraisals.

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ArtAsiaPacific

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PEN America blog

Frances Glessner Lee, the first lady of forensic science, was a cult curiosity. With her “Nutshell Studies” at the Renwick Gallery, she rises to art star.

The abstract artist unveils brilliant new work, Hirst’s spot paintings invade a Palladian mansion and Turner’s watercolours bring magic to Edinburgh – all in your weekly dispatch

Bridget Riley
Britain’s most brilliant abstract artist returns with new works created in the past four years. Riley’s intelligence is a marvel to behold.
• David Zwirner gallery, London, 19 January to 10 March.

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The Guardian, Dezeen

A museum show highlights the apprehensions and discrimination L.G.B.T. artists of Arab descent face.

Architect whose street-based housing projects showed great empathy for people and won him the RIBA royal gold medal

Neave Brown, who has died aged 88, was the architect of what is widely considered the finest housing built in Britain in the last 50 years. In the 1960s, through a series of housing projects in Camden, north London, of increasing scale – first five houses (Winscombe Street), then 72 (Fleet Road), then 522 (Alexandra Road) – he demonstrated a street-based alternative to high-rise housing that was immediately acclaimed both in Britain and abroad. But then in the 1970s and 80s, when the reaction against the welfare state set in, he was left high and dry, and it was solely in mainland Europe that he was to build further projects. Only in his final years, and especially in the last six months of his life, was his work recognised with the award of the Royal Institute of British Architects royal gold medal in September 2017 and a series of public appearances to sell-out audiences, culminating in a “for one night only” performance at the Hackney Empire, at which he received a 10-minute standing ovation.

What distinguished Brown as an architect of housing was that the technical ingenuity of his planning was matched by his passionate empathy for the people who would be living in the homes he designed. His flat and house plans were a masterpiece of compression, with not an inch of space wasted – allowing him to create in Britain, within the space and cost constraints of local authority housing, interiors that felt remarkably open and spacious. But these plans he saw not as an end in themselves but as the setting which the various residents would take and use as they wished. This humanistic quality was fundamental to his approach.

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SUNRISE: Ariana Reines’s January column

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Associated Press

Benn Keaveney escapes a CS gas attack in Derry, 1971

Teargas is awful – it gets you in the back of your throat and burns your eyes. It drifts quickly, and even when you think it has disappeared, the wind then changes and it’s back. As soon as you see it coming, you run.

This CS gas attack had taken place seconds before this photograph was taken, in a burnt-out sorting office in the Little Diamond area of Derry. We were jumping off the wall to get away from it. There had been a riot, and I remember we were trying to help some older people get away. I was 14.

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The Artnewspaper

Artist whose collaboration with young New Yorkers the Kids of Survival pioneered socially engaged conceptual art

Tim Rollins, who has died aged 62 of cardiovascular disease, was a conceptual artist and pioneer of socially engaged art. Always more interested in people than theory, Rollins made work in collaboration with young people from disadvantaged areas of New York City, and exhibited it under the moniker Tim Rollins and the KOS, or Kids of Survival.

Typically, the group painted on to pages torn from a classic book of western literature, mounted as a grid on large-scale canvases. Made collectively, the work ranges in aesthetic: Amerika (1984-89), a series of paintings in which a tangle of elongated drooping trumpets, painted in gold acrylic over pages of the Franz Kafka novel, recall abstract expressionism. In Animal Farm (1989-92), depictions of world leaders, each with the body of a beast, overlay Orwell’s parable. At the Hayward Gallery’s alternative art school, Wide Open School, in 2012, the group took inspiration from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, using ink, mustard seed, glue and apple juice to paint on Felix Mendelssohn’s score for the play.

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Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel claims that the significant cultural value of the president’s structures should be recognized – not everyone agrees

It was a sunny day in San Diego, last October, when President Trump unveiled eight prototypes for the proposed 1,900-mile border wall between the US and Mexico. Large slabs of concrete and metal stood tall like public art sculptures, some looked like the Berlin Wall; others were striped with jail cell-like bars.

Related: As Leonardo masterpiece sells for $450m, Trump effort goes for … slightly less than that

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The astronomy nut’s images of the red planet are a comment on how modern photography is doctored in the digital era

The swirling pink-tinged haze of alien clouds parts to provide a tantalising glimpse of violet terra firma – the surface of Mars – in this awesome image created by German photographer and astronomy nut Thomas Ruff.

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We Could Be Heroes, an exhibition of images by the photographer Marco Sconocchia, is billed as ‘bringing to life the world and underworld of modern Britain’. The show will be at the Italian Institute of Culture from 26 January-3 March

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At the Skyscraper Museum, a reminder of how Lower Manhattan was recast in the 1990s as a residential and cultural destination.

The institute, poised to open at Virginia Commonwealth University in April, announced the departure of its inaugural director, Lisa Freiman.

The Bronx Museum’s beautifully staged, streamlined version of the artist’s career still conveys a full picture of his radical sensibility.

The museum board’s action keeps the reward from dipping to $5 million in the quest for tips to recover works valued at $500 million stolen in 1990.

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SUNRISE: Ariana Reines’s January column

After a career spanning seven decades, the 90-year-old Australian artist still expects her audience to put in an effort

“Have you ever been pregnant?” artist Helen Maudsley asks me.

We are standing in a room papered with earthy pinks and purples, in front of a series of paintings peppered with an array of motifs – roses, columns, geometric hands, splashes of colour. Maudsley, one of Australia’s most tenacious and perhaps most underrated artists, is trying – valiantly – to help me understand her work.

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Wichita Eagle

Petition/Artnet

The Artnewspaper

The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is lending the painting — for which he paid $110.5 million at Sotheby’s last year.

Ms. Simmons directs and stars in this feature about a woman whose solitude perhaps helps and hinders her creativity.

Niall McDiarmid has spent seven years travelling the length and breadth of the UK photographing people he crosses paths with. Town to Town, his new book, features more than 60 portraits of inhabitants of some of the 200 towns he’s visited

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