Artforum International back issues from June 1997:
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Gifted ironists die hard. Which is why it's so painful to watch David Foster Wallace's awkward attempt to transmogrify from arch metafictionist to champion of Meaning. In his recent A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of magazine articles written between '92 and '96 and ...
Picks and plans. (architectural competition at the Museum of Modern Art)
Jun 22, 1997; ... Institutions move forward by renegotiating their own history. Drawing on its legacy of architectural provocation and promotion, beginning with the International Style show of 1932, the Museum of Modern Art is nearing the final stages of preparing for its renovation and expansion. Though a ...
Chronicle of a Disappearance.
Jun 22, 1997; ... "My life makes me laugh," Elia Suleiman writes in his notes to Chronicle of a Disappearance. "I am far from being courageous. I hate venturing. I wish to settle down and lead a linear existence, but even when I purposely attempt to conform, something is bound to go wrong." Suleiman's first ...
Street smarts. (Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron's 'without addresses')
Jun 22, 1997; ... Click on the projects icon on the Documenta Internet server (http://www.documenta.de) and the first thing you'll see is the page "Surfaces & Territories." From there, it's just another click to reach Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron's work, without addresses - a blue street map of some ...
Hot list. (World Wide Web sites on art)
Jun 22, 1997; ... Unless you've got an ISDN hookup, or even a T3, looking at art on the Web is still a band-width hogging, patience-testing, time-eating affair - like leafing through an art book after a three-year-old with a mouthful of gum and a lollipop in both hands has Just read It. You know there's ...
Macro Dub Infection, vol. 2.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Making like a cross between Mondo 2000 and Conde Nast Traveler, Business Week recently offered its readers a peek at the business trip of the near future. The CFO of the twenty-first century, the magazine testified, will be a cyberpunk in all but name, required to don a pair of VR goggles ...
Axiom Dub.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Making like a cross between Mondo 2000 and Conde Nast Traveler, Business Week recently offered its readers a peek at the business trip of the near future. The CFO of the twenty-first century, the magazine testified, will be a cyberpunk in all but name, required to don a pair of VR goggles ...
Land of Baboons: An Illclectic Collection of Brooklyn Soundz.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Making like a cross between Mondo 2000 and Conde Nast Traveler, Business Week recently offered its readers a peek at the business trip of the near future. The CFO of the twenty-first century, the magazine testified, will be a cyberpunk in all but name, required to don a pair of VR goggles ...
Party lines. (art institutions in Milan, Italy that are managed by the private sector)
Jun 22, 1997; ... On the night of July 16, 1993, the Pavilion of Contemporary Art (PAC) in Milan became the first target in a string of bombings that were later attributed to the Mafia. The Uffizi in Florence and a Roman church were damaged by explosives a few days later, and the PAC, an already fragile ...
Divided we stand. (Italy's diversely located centers that are devoted to contemporary art)
Jun 22, 1997; ... Unlike France or Great Britain, Italy has no single city from which the nation's cultural life radiates. Instead, our country's history of decentralization-until the middle of the nineteenth century it was a medley of small independent states - has given us a wealth of diverse urban centers, ...
Search for tomorrow. (promoting contemporary art in Rome, Italy)
Jun 22, 1997; ... At once sublimely evanescent and maddeningly dysfunctional, Rome remains suspended between a venerable past and a chaotic present, bewildering even to its oldest habitues. In this labyrinthine metropolis, contemporary art suffers the same fate as everything else, emerging from this ancient ...
Amalfi toast. (the revival of Naples, Italy's local art scene)
Jun 22, 1997; ... Contemporary art and the city of Naples haven't always gone hand-in-hand. To understand the extent of the ostracism. contemporary art has experienced here in the past, one only need recall that "Terrae Motus," the exhibition of sixty-five artists organized in the aftermath of the tremendous ...
Knowing looks. (Cindy Sherman, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY)
Jun 22, 1997; ... In December 1995, New York's Museum of Modern Art acquired the only complete set of Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills." Realized between 1977 and 1980, this. generation-defining series will go before the public this June in a special exhibition on view through September 2. As the ...
Jeff Koons: a studio visit: it's my party.(Cover Story)
Jun 22, 1997; ... As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results.- Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1846"My ideal ...
Tao and physics. (the art of Cai Guo Qiang)
Jun 22, 1997; ... Though Cai Guo Qiang emigrated to Japan in 1986 and now lives in New York, his recent exhibition "Flying Dragon in the Heavens," at Copenhagen's Louisiana Museum, clearly presented him as a contemporary artist from China, his birthplace. This emphasis on his origins was made all the more ...
Curzio Malaparte. (journalist, essayist, novelist and playwright)
Jun 22, 1997; ... Casa Malaparte, 1938In this ongoing series, writers are invited to discuss a contemporary work that has special significance for them.When it came to writing, Curzio Malaparte was a man on fire. He was a journalist and essayist, a novelist and a playwright. When it came ...
Vedova Mazzei. (the collaborative duo of Simeone Crispino and Stella Scala)
Jun 22, 1997; ... Legend has it that while out for a stroll artists Simeone Crispino and Stella Scala came across a ceramic slab, most likely a tombstone, bearing the words Vedova Mazzei (Widow Mazzei), a bare-bones epitaph that now serves the collaborative duo as their name. The pseudonym not only shrouds ...
"Braque: The Late Works." (Georges Braque, Royal Academy, London, England)
Jun 22, 1997; ... Sharing the prejudices of most New York art people, I had always located Braque on some remote and far too comfortable French planet, where, together with the likes of Bonnard, he went on cultivating his own beautiful gardens but could never do anything risky enough to make my pulse beat ...
Andres Serrano. (Paula Cooper Gallery, Chelsea, England)
Jun 22, 1997; ... When "A History of Andres Serrano/A History of Sex" opened earlier this year at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, the institution proposed an illustrated poster for the exhibition that would be displayed on billboards. The image selected, A History of Sex (Leo's Fantasy), 1996, shows ...
Toba Khedoori. (LA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA)
Jun 22, 1997; ... LA MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ARTIt's not often you run across an 11-by-25-foot painting that could be characterized as subtle, but that's true of all five works in Toba Khedoori's first solo museum show. Although Khedoori's pieces are scaled to the wall, it's hard to label her a ...
"L'empreinte." (various artists, Centre Georges Pompidou, France)
Jun 22, 1997; ... CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOUThe strange objects assembled by the exhibition "L'empreinte" (the imprint, imprinting) compelled me to think creatively, so I silently thanked organizer Georges Didi-Huberman and cocurator Didier Semin for the occasion. But "L'empreinte" often failed to ...
Matvey Levenstein. (Jack Tilton Gallery)
Jun 22, 1997; ... JACK TILTON GALLERYMatvey Levenstein's photo-based paintings address the perennial rivalry between painting and photography in contemporary art, which seems on the surface to have been decided in favor of photography. Who needs the hand of the painter when one can have a machine do ...
Luigi Ontani. (Sperone Westwater)
Jun 22, 1997; ... SPERONE WESTWATERWhen Bolognese artist Luigi Ontani first began to exhibit, in 1970, his work must have seemed radically surprising in that it was nakedly self-referential. This would have been rare in much cutting-edge '6os art, with its address of formal, material, and conceptual ...
Liam Gillick. (Basilico Fine Arts)
Jun 22, 1997; ... BASILICO FINE ARTSThe most striking aspect of Liam Gillick's recent Discussion Island, 1997, an installation of modular forms, was how liberally he sampled from Minimalism. Gillick's pristine, freestanding cubes and rectangular boxes, as well as his panels and a lighting grid, all ...
Meg Cranston. (Boesky & Callery)
Jun 22, 1997; ... BOESKY & CALLERYEven after poststructuralism's contestation of subjectivity and conceptualism's demolition job on the art object, a stubborn residue remains. For lack of a better term, Meg Cranston calls this residue "soul," and works at its contours with lyrical wit. Two recent ...
"Young and Restless." (various video artists, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY)
Jun 22, 1997; ... MUSEUM OF MODERN ARTWhen Jean-Luc Godard showed producers a rough cut of his film Le Mepris (Contempt, 1963), featuring megastar Brigitte Bardot, they were aghast to find the film devoid of nudity and demanded scenes with "BB" in the buff. Godard complied but used distancing ...
Jorge Pardo. (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL)
Jun 22, 1997; ... MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ARTHad you visited the new MCA building in Chicago in the past few months, you too would have stumbled across a gorgeous white sailboat resting inside the museum's dramatic four-story atrium as if in dry dock. This, the main element of Jorge Pardo's ...
No place (like home). (various artists, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN)
Jun 22, 1997; ... WALKER ART CENTERAs implied by the cover image of its catalogue - a bird's-eye-view of a suburban housing development, juxtaposed with a separate picture of clouds - "no place (like home)" aimed to unmoor comfortable museum-goers from their familiar notions of home and set them ...
"Sonambiente." ('Festival for Hearing and Seeing')
Jun 22, 1997; ... AKADEMIE DER KUNSTEIf the occasion that gave rise to "Sonambiente" was the three-hundredth anniversary of Berlin's venerable Akademie der Kunste, this month-long "Festival for hearing and seeing" was resolutely oriented to the future of Germany's new/old capital. In the process, ...
Sirk on Sirk.
Jun 22, 1997; ... When Sirk on Sirk first appeared in 1971, Douglas Sirk's rediscovery was still underway. He hadn't made a film since Imitation of Life (1959), the Lana Turner weepie that grossed more for Universal than any other film in the studio's history. He had retired to Switzerland and was directing ...
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Popular music is both the most banal and most mysterious thing imaginable, and it's almost impossible to write about. A good song carries in each phrase fragments of thought, feeling, and sensation, all going by in a flash. it refers to things everybody knows but it's rooted in the specific ...
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma.
Jun 22, 1997; ... This biography has a lot going for it: an urbane, insightful author and a famously flamboyant, risque subject who simultaneously is and isn't one of the signal forces in twentieth-century art. Michael Peppiatt, to his credit, does not fully conceal a certain ambivalence about the masochistic ...
Ask Dr. Mueller.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Nan Goldin's much reprinted portrait of Cookie Mueller in her coffin is moving precisely because it represents not just a personal loss, but the unthinkable stilling of a bundle of crazed iconic energy. Mueller, who died of AIDS in 1989, had many careers - actress, journalist, fiction ...
Lucian Freud.
Jun 22, 1997; ... The international acclaim recently accorded Lucian Freud's painting is a fascinating phenomenon. Freud is part of no movement or school; he has no influential followers (though several second-rate imitators); he is a private man, not given to mainstream interviews, profiles, or screen ...
The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept.
Jun 22, 1997; ... The aim of Catherine Soussloff's book is to locate the artist, as cultural figure, in "the discourse of history," an ambition motivated, its author writes, "by the obvious lack of critical discussion about the concept of the artist in exactly the literature where one might expect to find ...
Joan Mitchell.
Jun 22, 1997; ... According to Deirdre Bair's biography of Samuel Beckett, the writer saw Joan Mitchell, at least on first acquaintance, as a younger version of his close friend Brain van Velde. To him she expressed the same relentless quest for the void that he found in the older man's painting. She refused, ...
Largesse.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Between 1990 and 1994 the Department of Graphic Arts at the Louvre made its holdings available to three guest curators "outside the discipline of art history" for a program called Parti Pris (which the American publisher calls "Taking Sides" but which here may be translated more ...
The Road That Is Not a Road, and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile.
Jun 22, 1997; ... The twentieth-century Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro wrote, "Flee from the external sublime if you don't want to die flattened by the wind." For better or worse, some of Huidobro's compatriots are tempting the elements.The Road That Is Not a Road is an account of the theoretical ...
The Muses.
Jun 22, 1997; ... At various points in the course of The Muses, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has seen fit to acknowledge the uneasy relationship between aesthetics as a formal branch of philosophy and the art that is its presumed object. "We are quite aware," he says, "that the temper of the times is to ...
Adrian Piper: Out of Order, Out of Sight, 2 vols.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Adrian Piper's career as an artist, writer, and philosopher has spanned some of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. The last thirty years have borne witness to the breakdown of old certainties as those previously denied representation emerged, through independence struggles ...
When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth.
Jun 22, 1997; ... Critics with appropriate expertise tend to carp at occupational subset novels because they never seem to get the details - about doctors, ballet dancers, cattle rustlers, or even nuclear cruiser crews - exactly right. Fernanda Eberstadt's art-world novel, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the ...
To Place: Haraldsdottir.
Jun 22, 1997; ... "Originally I thought I would model the series after Plato's Dialogues but then I thought that would be a bit much," Roni Horn said about her books. She chose Diderot's Encyclopaedia instead. Never mind; modesty is not a virtue in art, and the six publications that now constitute Horn's ...
The Lonely Life.
Jun 22, 1997; ... "Originally I thought I would model the series after Plato's Dialogues but then I thought that would be a bit much," Roni Horn said about her books. She chose Diderot's Encyclopaedia instead. Never mind; modesty is not a virtue in art, and the six publications that now constitute Horn's ...
Cartoon Hits.
Jun 22, 1997; ... "Originally I thought I would model the series after Plato's Dialogues but then I thought that would be a bit much," Roni Horn said about her books. She chose Diderot's Encyclopaedia instead. Never mind; modesty is not a virtue in art, and the six publications that now constitute Horn's ...
Dirt: The Essence of Celebrity.
Jun 22, 1997; ... "Originally I thought I would model the series after Plato's Dialogues but then I thought that would be a bit much," Roni Horn said about her books. She chose Diderot's Encyclopaedia instead. Never mind; modesty is not a virtue in art, and the six publications that now constitute Horn's ...
Auf dem Dach/On the Roof.
Jun 22, 1997; ... "Originally I thought I would model the series after Plato's Dialogues but then I thought that would be a bit much," Roni Horn said about her books. She chose Diderot's Encyclopaedia instead. Never mind; modesty is not a virtue in art, and the six publications that now constitute Horn's ...
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media.
Jun 22, 1997; ... It's a good thing that Elaine Showalter left her job as TV critic for People magazine. Being forced on a regular basis to subject herself to the likes of Unsolved Mysteries, The X-Files, Hard Copy, and endless made-for-TV movies appears to have left her with a sort of Post-Traumatic Stress ...