Art in America back issues from June 2008:
Mindful artists.(Letter to the editor)
Jun 01, 2008; ... To the Editors: Thanks to Nancy Princenthal for her brilliant and thoroughly researched article on art and the mind [A.i.A., Apr. '08]. In early 2007, Art Institute of Boston co-curator Ellen Schon and I surveyed the Boston area for artists who focus on mental processes as a ...
Counting the Fallen.(Letter to the editor)
Jun 01, 2008; ... To the Editors: I am most appreciative of the article about my installation Fallen in your April 2008 issue. However, I wish to make one correction. The article states that the "official count" of the American war dead "includes only soldiers killed on the battlefield, leaving ...
Rating Ramirez.(Letter to the editor)
Jun 01, 2008; ... To the Editors: Richard Kalina's article on Martin Ramirez's artwork [A.i.A., Oct. '07] is an inspired treatise on Ramirez's art and his deserving place "within" the mainstream of modernism. I agree that this artist's passion and perseverance admirably pushed his exploration of ...
Timing Cleveland's expansion.(Letter to the editor)
Jun 01, 2008; ... To the Editors: I was glad to see the Cleveland Museum of Art's expansion and renovation referenced in Ruth Meyer's report from Detroit, "A Citizens' Museum" [A.i.A., May '08]. However, I would like to offer a correction and to clarify the timeline for the project. ...
Boris Lurie remembered.(Letter to the editor)
Jun 01, 2008; ... To the Editors: Here are some clarifications for the Boris Lurie obituary [A.i.A., Apr. '08]. He did not like or respect the museums and refused to show at the Whitney unless they let him choose the work. We started the NO! movement in 1963 at Gallery Gertrude Stein, after Boris ...
Candidates on the arts.(FRONT PAGE)(presidential candidate's art policy)
Jun 01, 2008; ... With an unpopular war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and global oil, food and economic crises looming, national arts policy isn't exactly the hot political topic it was during the culture wars of the 1990s. But for the record, here's where the candidates stand on the arts. ...
Art: the other game in Beijing.(FRONT PAGE)
Jun 01, 2008; ... The Beijing Summer Olympics are scheduled for Aug. 8-24, and theoretically the city's art world is preparing to take advantage of the upcoming concentration of global attention, in practice, however, most spaces are playing it safe, given the tense political climate and new restrictions on ...
Art in Denver: no contest.(FRONT PAGE)(Denver Office of Cultural Affairs has organized a series of artists' projects)
Jun 01, 2008 ... To coincide with the Democratic National Convention this August, the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs has organized a series of artists' projects. An official program of the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee, "Dialog:City" (Aug. 21-29) will feature 10 projects throughout the city ....
Louise Bourgeois on the big screen.(FRONT PAGE)(Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress, and The Tangerine)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Coinciding with Louise Bourgeois's touring retrospective opening at New York's Guggenheim Museum on June 27, several recent documentary films about the life and work of the French-born New York artist are screening in U.S. theaters. One of the major features is Louise Bourgeois: The ...
Oppenheim "Church" uprooted again.(FRONT PAGE)(Dennis Oppenheim's exhibition)(Brief article)
Jun 01, 2008 ... Since its debut at the Venice Biennale in 1997, Dennis Oppenheim's monumental outdoor sculpture, Device to Root Out Evil, has drawn plenty of controversy and recently caused an upset in Canada. The 22-foot-tall work, in steel, glass and aluminum, showing an upended church whose steeple is ...
Provocation art: where to draw the line?(FRONT PAGE)(art exhibition posponed because of animal rights protest)
Jun 01, 2008; ... A number of artists' projects have recently stirred up controversy, variously raising the ire of animal-rights activists, abortion opponents, pro-choice advocates, fertility-challenged women, and more. On Mar. 26, Adel Abdessemed's show at the San Francisco Art Institute was ...
Whitney's plans for downtown.(FRONT PAGE)(Whitney Museum of American Art expansion plan)
Jun 01, 2008 ... On May 1, the Whitney Museum of American Art released the latest plan in its on-again-off-again attempts to expand, this time to an offsite location. In late 2006, the Whitney, battling community opposition to its recent expansion scheme, designed by Renzo Piano, jumped at the opportunity ...
Future home for still museum.(FRONT PAGE)(Clyfford Still Museum )(Brief article)
Jun 01, 2008 ... The Clyfford Still Museum has released the plans for its future home in Denver, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. Groundbreaking is scheduled for early 2009 with an opening projected for 2010. The 31,500-square-foot, two-story museum will occupy a site in the shadow ...
Summer preview.(SANTA FE)(Calendar)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Neither a downturn in the economy nor high gas prices seem to have deterred the tourist and cultural industries in the Santa Fe region, which continue to thrive. In addition to the proliferation of casinos with adjacent golf courses, convention centers and concert halls appearing on the ...
Pen & ink.(Cartoon)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Dan Perjovschi on the state of the world I reach God I reach CNN [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] HURRAH HURRAH! [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I AM OPPRESSED! [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] MY DICTATOR WAS ...
Artists, guns and money.(Art Power)(Guernica and Total War)(Book review)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Art Power, by Boris Groys, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2008; 185 pages, $22.95 hardcover. Guernica and Total War, by Ian Patterson, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2007; 199 pages, $22.95 hardcover. In spite of the war in Iraq, most citizens of the United ...
The art of suffering.(The Abu Ghraib Effect)(Book review)
Jun 01, 2008; ... The Abu Ghraib Effect, by Stephen F. Eisenman, London, Reaktion Books, Ltd., distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2007; 144 pages, $19.95 paper. Among the most indelible and disturbing images from the Iraq War are the photographs taken over the course of several months in ...
Activist esthetics.(Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall)(Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century)(Book review)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, by Allan Antliff, Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007; 224 pages, $23.95 paper. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, by Gerald Raunig, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2007; 272 ...
Abstract expressionism and the Cold War: did New York really steal the idea of modern art? Were the artists tools of U.S. policy? 25 years on, Serge Guilbaut's j'accuse can still prompt a fiery response.(ISSUES & COMMENTARY)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A major thesis of Serge Guilbaut's How New York le the Idea of Modern Art is that the Abstract Expressionists were Cold Warriors. Soon after his book was published in 1983, Guilbant and I debated this claim at the Whitney Museum. It struck me then as ...
Cold war and hot art: a wide-ranging and politically alert exhibition revealed new aspects of that durable topic of 20th-century art history: the postwar cultural rivalry between France and the U.S.(REPORT FROM BARCELONA)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Now at the beginning of an age of demented mechanic, all plastic art is created under the threat of material destruction, for even at the base of the pigment are the explosive elements of the atom. --Tennessee Williams, "Hans Hofmann, An Appreciation," 1949 It's ...
Making it real: the amateur photography of war brings new content and esthetics to documentary and fictional filmmaking.(WAR MOVIES)
Jun 01, 2008; ... We can imagine, in the privacy of our thoughts, that war is heroic and honorable--even noble. Photography can make it difficult for us to maintain these illusions. --Errol Morris, New York Times, Nov. 20, 2004 The recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been ...
The way we were, the way we are: China's most outspoken artist reflects on the ongoing struggle for expressive freedom in the People's Republic.(CHINA WATCH)(Ai Weiwei)(Interview)
Jun 01, 2008; ... AN INTERVIEW WITH AI WEIWEI Art in America: Your acquaintance with art and politics in China clearly began with your father, the famous modernist poet Ai Qing. In 1935, long before you were born, he was imprisoned by Nationalist forces for engaging in Marxist activities. Then, ...
The revolution will be visualized: the compelling graphic designs of Emory Douglas, "Revolutionary Artist" of the Black Panther Party, helped shape the group's public image and reflected its evolution from politically militant to socially mitigating.(POLITICAL GRAPHICS)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Looking beyond the gallery scene, deeply rooted in his conviction that all art is political, and valuing real-life action and change above all else, Emory Douglas used his prodigious graphic skills as Minister of Culture and Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party from 1967, the ...
NY galleries.(Calendar)
Jun 01, 2008 ... CHELSEA Aperture Gallery 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212.505.5555 Fax: 212.505.7527 Email: publicity@aperture.org Website: www.aperture.org Tuesday-Saturday: 10:00-6:00 May 22-July 31: Aperture ...
Bearing witness: a recent show at El Museo del Barrio explored four decades of performance art in the Americas.(ACTIONS)
Jun 01, 2008; ... A video of Papo Colo's Superman 51 (1977) was installed above the entrance to "Arte [not equal to] Vida: Actions by Artists from the Americas, 1960-2000," a survey of Latin American action- and performance-based art curated by Deborah Cullen for El Museo del Barrio in New York, where it ...
Argentina provokes: a recent exhibition linked contemporary Argentine art to that of the generation preceding the 1976 coup and ensuing "dirty war.".(IMPORT/EXPORT)(Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy: An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1960-2007)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Argentine culture has a sort of amnesia when it comes to its own art. This lacuna has developed both as a psychic mechanism for moving forward despite all the crises that have befallen the country, and because of a tendency of artists to find inspiration in international art movements ...
Destroy, they said: in what was billed as an attempt to "de-Hellenize" contemporary Greek culture and relieve it of its classical past, the 1st Athens Biennial sprang into being.(REPORT FROM ATHENS)(the first Athens Biennial titled Destroy Athens)
Jun 01, 2008; ... This past fall, Athens succumbed to the pandemic of biennial fever and mounted the 1st Athens Biennial, provocatively titled "Destroy Athens." The joint inspiration of curator Xenia Kalpaktsoglou (who is also the director of the Deste Foundation), artist Poka-Yio and critic Augustine ...
Primary colors: an artist takes aim at the never ending presidential campaign.(ELECTIONS)(Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's Residential Erection)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's first New York solo show, "Residential Erection," was the perfect antidote to the nonstop media drama surrounding the run-up to the presidential election. Born in 1976, Hung came to the U.S. from Hong Kong with his family before the 1997 handover to China. ...
In times of trouble: several recent videos and films reflect the growing cultural response, often indirect but nonetheless penetrating, to the political conditions of our day.
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] From the fifth year of the U.S. war in Iraq and the final year of the Bush presidency, the 20th century looks like a very distant place, and a cultural response has slowly built to the ravaged political landscape this administration has created. A trickle ...
Collateral damage: Siah Armajani's Fallujah employs some of his signature architectural vocabulary in a new, darkly pessimistic tone.
Jun 01, 2008; ... Siah Armajani, the Iranian-American artist well known for his public-art projects and sculptures of sociopolitical import, moved to the U.S. in 1960, at the age of 21. Since that time, the central recurring message and intended social function of his work has been to reflect upon and ...
Global warnings.(Melting Ice /A Hot Topic: Envisioning Change)(Calendar)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Melting Ice /A Hot Topic" proclaims the name of the exhibition subtitled "Envisioning Change," which opened in Oslo last June, traveled to Brussels and Monaco, and opened recently at Chicago's Field Museum. Indeed, after being shocked by the devastation ...
Talking politics 2008: six artists who have taken on controversial public issues in their work assess the current status of political art.(Discussion)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the midst of a particularly bruising political year, and as the ever more unpopular Iraq war competes for public attention with signs of impending economic disaster at home, it seems an appropriate moment to reassess the relationship between art and ...
Rules of Engagement: with photographic truthfulness no longer taken on faith, some photographers are working out a new set of protocols for making pictures that are seriously real.
Jun 01, 2008; ... Shortly before the conclusion of Shattered Glass, the 2003 film that recounts the downfall of a hot young journalist at the New Republic who was found to have fabricated the better part of his reputation-building features, the magazine's anguished editor receives an assessment of how the ...
Written in Stone: built of blocks from Israel and Palestine and assembled by masons from throughout the region, Michal Rovner's massive stone structures rely on delicate networks of understanding.
Jun 01, 2008; ... Though she set out to be a dancer, Michal Rovner has instead pursued photography and video, with a gradual switch in emphasis from still to moving images. Over the past 15 years, her video projects have grown both more abstract and, especially lately, more elaborate. Barely figurative ...
Handforth's fallen angels: Mark Handforth's heterogeneous sculpture coalesced in an installation with thematic intimations of lost paradise.
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mark Handforth's recent exhibition at Gavin Brown in New York, the artist's first since 2005, was no less than thrilling. Proving again that he is capable of working in a variety of styles and mediums, he is presently pushing the narrative direction of his ...
Sticking it: beginning with the controversial "Supercock" drawings she did at Yale during the Vietnam War, Judith Bernstein has sustained a bold feminist critique of masculinity fetishized into militarism.(Signature and Phallic Drawings: 1966-2008)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Judith Bernstein's recent show at Mitchell Algus Gallery, a kind of mini-retrospective titled "Signature and Phallic Drawings: 1966-2008," leaves us impatient for a fuller treatment of her career, as well as a robust presentation of her current work. ...
Piotr Uklanski at Gagosian.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... In a flamboyant introduction to the cultural and military history of his native Poland, Piotr Uklanski, who lives in New York and Warsaw, dressed the far wall of an imposing and very long foyer with the flat-pleated drapes ordinarily used to skirt a dais. High upon the blood-red expanse, ...
Subodh Gupta at Jack Shainman.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... An elaborate installation of towers of highly polished metal food vessels stacked on a long moving platform stood at the entrance to Subodh Gupta's second exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery. At once coolly mechanical and seductive, this gleaming array of steel, aluminum, copper and brass ...
Ai Weiwei at Mary Boone.(NEW YORK)(Illumination)
Jun 01, 2008; ... "Illumination," only the second New York solo for Ai Weiwei, was a literally sparkling demonstration of the Chinese artist's gifts for formal seduction and pointed commentary, Ai commanded the gallery's grand space with three works (all 2007), two on his longstanding theme of light, one ...
Coco Fusco at The Project.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... For an exhibition called "Buried Pig with Moros," Coco Fusco assembled various documents and artifacts pertaining to the treatment of Islamic insurgents, known as Moros and also as juramentados, who resisted the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in the early part of the 20th century. (Not ...
Tseng Kwong Chi at Paul Kasmin.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... In 1978, the artist Joseph Tseng, not yet 30, changed his name to Tseng Kwong Chi and moved to New York. Born and educated in Hong Kong, he had studied in Vancouver, Montreal and Paris. In New York he established himself as a photographer and familiar of the art, fashion and club scenes of ...
Los Carpinteros at Sean Kelly.(NEW YORK)(Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "A household item shows who you are," Marco Castillo, of the duo Los Carpinteros, told a Cincinnati reporter on the occasion of a 2006 exhibition there. If so, many sculptures by this Havana-based pair (Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez), which are often ...
Yinka Shonibare at James Cohan.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... According to Yinka Shonibare MBE (who always uses his honorific, relishing the irony of its placement after his patently un-English name), "Prospero's Monsters," the title of his recent exhibition, refers to the colonialist implications of the imprisonment of Caliban in The Tempest ....
Luis Camnitzer at Alexander Gray.(NEW YORK)(Last Words )
Jun 01, 2008; ... This succinct, text-driven and quietly powerful exhibition included just two works, one old and one new, evidencing disparate but not dueling aspects of a pioneering Conceptualist's practice. Since the late 1960s, Luis Camnitzer's work has been driven by a desire to reveal widespread ...
Meg Webster at Paula Cooper.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Among four newly minted containers in Meg Webster's first solo exhibition in New York since 2000 is Melted Weapon Box (2008). It consists of two nested cubes, one of steel and the other aluminum, 4 3/4 inches in outside measure, displayed next to a full-scale black-and-white photograph of ...
Suzanne Treister and Kim Rugg at P.P.O.W.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... The print media may be dying, but Suzanne Treister and Kim Rugg, artists based in the UK who show mainly in Europe, have each found ways to keep them alive--at least for the time being. Treister is best known for her ongoing project HEXEN 2039, which features a time-traveling alter ego ....
Muntadas at Kent.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... A telling marker of the distance we have traveled in the last 20 years is the contrast between Muntadas's 1985 Selling the Future, installed in a back room at Kent during his latest exhibition, and his new work on view in the main spaces. The older piece, which now takes the form of ...
Robin Lowe at Lennon, Weinberg.(NEW YORK)(On the Beach)
Jun 01, 2008; ... A New York-based painter given to narrative cycles, Robin Lowe found his source for this exhibition of stylized marine paintings in Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach (1957). A product of the Cold War, it supposed the consequences of global nuclear disaster. In t 959, the year of Lowe's ...
Robert Rauschenberg at PaceWildenstein and Jacobson Howard.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Robert Rauschenberg's show of recent photo-transfer pieces, "Runts," at PaceWildenstein, was full of vitality. Each of these 16 montages feature crisp blowups selected from the artist's extensive archive of photos from his world travels, meticulously ...
Dennis Rudolph at Perry Rubenstein.(NEW YORK)(The Holy War, Chapter One: The Sacrifice of Youth)
Jun 01, 2008; ... The melodramatic title of Berliner Dennis Rudolph's first New York solo show, 'THE HOLY WAR, Chapter One: The Sacrifice of Youth," belied the reserved execution of its main feature--a group of eight identically sized paintings sourced from photographs of German World War II soldiers. Each ...
Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... The dreamy ambiguity of Luc Tuymans's recent paintings makes it hard to locate an exact source of foreboding--but beneath the hushed atmospherics, it's there. His work emanates a cold light, the canvases' surfaces faintly visible beneath pale planes of color. The effect is of apparitions ...
Subhankar Banerjee at Sundaram Tagore.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Subhankar Banerjee's exhibition of large-scale color photographs documents the Alaskan Arctic as it has never been seen or imagined before. As the first photographer to shoot a complete record of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in all seasons, however, Banerjee, a former physicist and ...
Adrian Piper at Elizabeth Dee.
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Throughout her career, Adrian Piper has engaged the uneasy issue of race in post-Civil Rights era America, a time when racial tension has not often been at the political forefront but has still simmered and occasionally boiled over. Piper's early work drew ...
Adel Abdessemed at P.S.1.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... In his contribution to last summer's Venice Biennale, Adel Abdessemed had 11 neon signs with the word "Exil" written on them installed at some of the Biennale's exits. Exil, in French, means "exile," but to the Anglophone, it appears to be a misspelling of the word "exit." ...
Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With monumental tableaux of strangely ordinary worlds, Jeff Wall continues to chart the terrain of contemporary photographic realism. His recent show included six mural-size, black-and-white prints and two equally large color transparencies mounted on ...
Lori Grinker at Nailya Alexander.(NEW YORK)(Iraq: Scars and Exiles)
Jun 01, 2008; ... "At least in Iraq you die only once," an Iraqi refugee, "Zahar," one of the subjects of photographer Lori Grinker's recent exhibition "Iraq: Scars and Exiles," said about seeking refuge in Amman, Jordan, after the U.S.'s "freedom" mission. Like all these urban exiles, she is afraid to ...
Sigalit Landau at the Museum of Modern Art.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sigalit Landau has incorporated rotting fruit, storms of cotton candy and moldy mouse pads in her installations; fashioned lifesize ecorche figures that are persuasively surfaced with papier-mache sinew and gore; and distributed ice lollies to eager tots ...
Andre Butzer at Metro Pictures.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Visitors to Andre Butzer's recent show at Metro Pictures found themselves, in the opening gallery, stared down by four giant, cartoonlike figures from 10-by-7-foot paintings barely big enough to hold them. All four wear antique, stiff white collars above ...
Hans van Meeuwen at Cristinerose.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Hans van Meeuwen's A Man's Height (2007) was carefully positioned so that viewers immediately saw it through a succession of doorways when stepping off the elevator to enter Cristinerose's new space on 26th Street. The sculpture (polystyrene, plaster, wood ...
David Maeh at Forum.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] David Mach's large-scale collages (all 2007) are composed of thousands of postcards, placed upon each other so that only a fraction of the image is visible. Shards of postcard images ranging from Marilyn Monroe to a Hokusai wave are meticulously arranged ...
John Baldessari and Alejandro Cesarco at Murray Guy.(NEW YORK)(Retrospective)
Jun 01, 2008; ... "Retrospective," a collaboration between John Baldessari and the promising young Uruguayan artist Alejandro Cesarco, combines simple graphics with sly literary exchanges. The project, part of the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, is a testament to the power of language. ...
Stephen Dean at Sara Meltzer.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... An exploration of color is central to Stephen Dean's work. In previous exhibitions, the French-born New York artist examined its sociopolitical implications in lush videos such as Pulse (2001), shot at a Hindu festival in north India in which devotees douse themselves with powdered and ...
Heather Cox at Knoedler.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Responding to the natural phenomena of gatherings and movements of creatures of a kind, Heather Cox designed the kinetic, penetrable installation Migration (2006), inaugurating the new Knoedler project space on the gallery's lower floor. She suspended some ...
George Condo at Luhring Augustine.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] This may be George Condo's most effective exhibition to date. Close on the heels of his sensation-causing show in London--with its distorted portrait of Queen Elizabeth, dubbed by the artist the "cabbage patch Queen"--Condo presented three crucifixions ...
George Condo at Nicholas Robinson.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Scion of the court of Velazquez by way of Disneyland, George Condo established himself as the grand mannerist of contemporary Pop painting in the vibrant East Village scene of the early 1980s. At no loss for amusement in his own mastery of the painterly gesture and familiarity with ...