Artforum back issues from May 2007:
Post War
May 01, 2007; ... MARTIN HERBERT ON STEVE MCQUEEN'S QUEEN AND COUNTRY FOR THE PAST thirty-five years, the Art Commissions Committee of London's Imperial War Museum has invited artists to make work responding to the activities of British and Commonwealth troops, whether they be engaged in combat or in ...
Sleep Therapy
May 01, 2007; ... ROBIN WOOD ON TSAI MING-LIANG'S I DON'T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE TSAI MING-LIANG'S previous film. The Wayward Cloud, was almost universally hated; at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival screening there were even walkouts in protest by those who found the work pornographic. It is to ...
Horse Whisperers
May 01, 2007; ... AMY TAUBIN ON ZOO "BUT HOW EXACTLY did they do it?" more than a few people asked after seeing, or just hearing about, Robinson Devor's Zoo, which premiered in the documentary competition at this year's Sundance Film Festival and just opened in New York theaters. It seemed to me then (and ...
The Artwork Formerly Known as Prince's
May 01, 2007; ... BRUCE HAINLEY ON THE EARLY WORK OF RICHARD PRINCE CONSIDER, FOR A MOMENT, "Fugitive Artist: The Early Work of Richard Prince, 1974-77," currently on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, State University of New York, and organized by art historian Michael l.obcl, ...
Worlds Apart
May 01, 2007; ... HELEN MOLESWORTH ON GENERATIONS OF FEMINISM TAKING THE SIXTH STREET EXIT off the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles these days puts you square in front of an enormous mural featuring a group of well-dressed lovelies. When I saw it, my heart skipped a heat-was it the cast of The L Word, ...
Space Exploration
May 01, 2007; ... KEVIN PRATT ON "CLIP/STAMP/FOLD" THE STOREFRONT FOR Art and Architecture is a small wedge of space, tucked behind Vito Acconci and Stephen Holl's unfolding facade on Kenmare Street in Lower Manhattan. Barely fifteen feet deep, it was the perfect opening venue for "Clip/Stamp/Fold: The ...
Chip Lord
May 01, 2007; ... 1 LIVING WITH WAR (2006) Neil Young's protest album is a heartfelt, humanist howl grounded in three-chord rock, hut it goes deeper than the music. The special-edition CD includes a DVU with ten music videos that sample news footage and Bush sound bites, plus a documentary for each song. Young ...
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years
May 01, 2007; ... Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years MUSEUM OF MODERN ART June 3-September 10 Curated by Lynne Cooke and Kynaston McShine This year, the public will likely be more receptive to Richard Serra's work than it was two decades ago during his first Museum of Modern Art ...
The Shapes of Space
May 01, 2007; ... NEW YORK The Shapes of Space SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM April 14-September 5 Curated by Kevin Lotery, Ted Mann. Nancy Spector, and Nat Trotman Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral structure has long embodied the polemics of museological space. Quintesscnti.illv ...
Lincoln Kirstein
May 01, 2007; ... Lincoln Kirstein WHlTNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART April 25-August 26 Curated by Carter Foster. Elisabeth Sussman. and Jerry L. Thompson Sometimes, in the world of art, friendships are what define a person's legacy-or so this exhibition, which celebrates the social ...
Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture
May 01, 2007; ... NEW YORK Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART May 1-July29 Curated by Anne L. Strauss and Gary Tinterow This exhibition promises yet another round of what Michael Fried famously called the struggle for Frank Stella's ...
Paul Poiret
May 01, 2007; ... Paul Poiret METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART May 9-August 5 Curated by Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda To understand the radicality of Paul Poiret's designs, you have to compare his "look" to the starchy, buxom. Edwardian silhouette that preceded it. True, the "Pasha of ...
Louise Nevelson
May 01, 2007; ... Louise Nevelson JEWISH MUSEUM May 5-September 16 Curated by Brooke Kamin Rapaport The Jewish Museum is now staging Louise Nevelson's first US survey since 1967, an exhibition both long overdue and somehow of the moment, given the swarm of young artists quoting her ...
The Happiness of Objects
May 01, 2007; ... The Happiness of Objects SCULPTURE CENTER April 29-July29 Curated by Sarina Basta Jumping off from art historian W. J. T. Mitchell's 2005 hook, \Vhat Do Pictures Wiinti, this exhibition, organized by new SculptureCenter curator Sarina Basta, proposes that artworks ...
Linder Sterling
May 01, 2007; ... NEW YORK Linder Sterling P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER May 24-September 10 Curated by Neville Wakefield Despite a penchant tor knives, Linder Sterling has never been one for staying in the kitchen. In the late 1970s and early '80s, she was the singer in ...
Peter Young
May 01, 2007; ... Peter Young P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER June 24-September 10 Curated by David Deutsch and Alanna Heiss In 1969, Peter Young was a New York painter with a Whitney Annual and a Guggenheim Theodoran Award to his credit. But he took off for Costa Rica, blowing off ...
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
May 01, 2007; ... BOSTON Philip-Lorca diCorcia INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART June 1-September 3 Curated by Bennett Simpson Despite being one of the leading lights of the so-called Boston School, Philip-Lorca diCorcia has nor been the subject of a museum exhibition in the ...
Edward Hopper
May 01, 2007; ... Edward Hopper MUSEUM OF FlNEARTS May6-August 19 Curated by Judith Barter, Franklin Kelly, and Carol Troyen Tate Modern mounted a major Edward Hopper show only a few years hack, hut it never made it to the States. The current retrospective's co-organizing museums ...
Civilization and Its Contents
May 01, 2007; ... US NEWS NATALIE KAMPEN ON THE NEW GREEK AND ROMAN GALLERIES OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART FOLLOWING A FIVE-YEAR construction project (and a decade of planning before that), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has opened its new Greek and Roman galleries with ...
Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy
May 01, 2007; ... WILLIAMSTOWN, MA Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy WILLIAMS COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART July 8-November 11 Curated by Deborah Rothschild Today, only seven canvases by modernist painter Gerald Murphy survive. Nevertheless, he and his ...
Spencer Finch
May 01, 2007; ... NORTH ADAMS, MA Spencer Finch MASS MOCA May 26. 2007-March 31, 2008 Curated by Susan Cross Meditating on this show's koanlike title, "What Time Is It on the Sun?," viewers may discover how best to approach Spencer Finch's ongoing investigation of light, ...
John Armleder
May 01, 2007; ... WALTHAM, MA John Armleder ROSE ART MUSEUM April 26-JuIy 29 Curated by Raphaela Platow Q: What do you get when you cross flower-encircled scaffolding, abstract painting, fluorescent lights, mirrors, silver Christmas-tree limits, stuffed animals, piles of ...
Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945
May 01, 2007; ... WASHINGTON, DC Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 NATIONAL GALLERY OFART June 10-September 3 Curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky This survey of photographic practice in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the former Czechoslovakia, bracketed by ...
Wildlife Conservation
May 01, 2007; ... MEREDITH MARTIN ON JEAN-BAPTISTE OUDRY AT THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES BEFORE BARBARO or Dolly the cloned sheep, there was Clara, an Indian rhinoceros who reigned as the biggest celebrity animal in mid-eightcenth-century Europe. Escorted by her Dutch owner, Clara toured the ...
Chris Marker
May 01, 2007; ... COLUMBUS, OH Chris Marker WEXNER C ENTER FOR THE ARTS May 12-August 12 Curated by Bill Horrigan "In Marker's work, the face as irreducible mystery has been a gravitational force, from the country-keyed cover girls of the Petite Planète travel books onward ...
Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City
May 01, 2007; ... CHICAGO Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART June 23-September 2 Curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm While the invocation ot Joseph Beuys's concept of "social sculpture" seems somewhat misplaced here, the ...
Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art
May 01, 2007; ... HOUSTON Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON May 26-August 5 Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver While the title of this exhibition vaunts a media-bused theme, it also puns on the show's other focus ....
Eden's Edge: Fifteen LA Artists
May 01, 2007; ... LOS ANGELES Eden's Edge: Fifteen LA Artists HAMMER MUSEUM May 13-September2 Curated by Gary Garrels For his first survey since joining the Hammer in May 2005, chief curator Gary Garrels eschews thematic, generational, and medium-specific coherence in favor ...
Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, and Suzy Lake, 1972-78
May 01, 2007; ... SANTA MONICA, CA Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, and Suzy Lake, 1972-78 SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART May 19-August 11 Curated by Jori Finkel Before Judith Butler theorized gender as performative, and before Cindy Sherman began snapping her ...
Mary Heilmann
May 01, 2007; ... NEWPORT BEACH, CA Mary Heilmann ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART May20-August 26 Curated by Elizabeth Armstrong As if to make up for our belated recognition of Mary Heilmann, Armstrong has organized not one but two exhibitions around the artist's work. The main ...
Tracing Roads Through Central Asia
May 01, 2007; ... SAM FRANCISCO Tracing Roads Through Central Asia YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS April 18-JuIy 13 Curated by Berin Golonu and Elena Sorokina As an exhibition usefully considered in tandem with Viktor Misi.ino's "Time of the Storytellers" (at Kiasina in ...
Dalí and Film
May 01, 2007; ... LONDON Dalí and Film TATE MODERN June 1-September 9 Curated by Dawn Ades, Montse Aguer, Félix Fanès, and Matthew Gale Salvador DaIf s contributions to the art of cinema are well known, but the influence of film on bis practice in other media is less so ....
Kenneth and Mary Martin
May 01, 2007; ... LONDON Kenneth and Mary Martin CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE July 13-September 16 Curated by Celia Davies and Sarah Martin Bridget Riley didn't come out of nowhere, and English art in the 1950s was not just kitchen-sink realism and incipient Pop. If you had gone to ...
Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years
May 01, 2007; ... Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years BARBICAN ART GALLERY June 5-September 9 Curated by Mark Sladen and Ariella Yedgar Following the stage-setting exhibition "The Secret Public: The Last Days of the British Underground 1978-1988," organized by the Kunstverein ...
Peter Blake
May 01, 2007; ... LIVERPOOL, UK Peter Blake TATE LIVERPOOL June 29-September 23 Curated by Christoph Grunenberg and Laurence Sillars I know it's in Liverpool, but can't we forget about Sgt. Pepper even for a minute? Peter Blake doesn't need the Beatles' reflected glory-he ...
Richard Long
May 01, 2007; ... EDINBURGH Richard Long SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART June 30-October 21 Curated by Patrick Elliott Though Richard Long is often referred to as a practitioner of Land art, this tag can be misleading. His focus on the physical and perceptual ...
What Is to Be Done?
May 01, 2007; ... INTERNATIONAL NEWS JENNIFER ALLEN TALKS WITH THE CURATORS OF DOCUMENTA 12 SINCE ITS INAUGURATION in 1955 in Kassel, Documenta has become perhaps the most highly anticipated linchpin of the art-world calendar, arriving every five years to provide an assessment of the international ...
Show and Tell
May 01, 2007; ... TIM GRIFFIN TALKS WITH CURATOR ROBERT STORR ABOUT THE 52ND VENICE BIENNALE NAMED "THINK WITH THE SENSES, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense," the fifty- second Venice Biennale opens on June 10, organized for the first time hy an American curator, Robert Storr. Art/ornai editor ...
Lucian Freud
May 01, 2007; ... DUBLIN IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART June 6-September2 Curated by Catherine Lampert Eighty-five this December, Lucian Freud remains portrait painting's point man-even Elizabeth II allowed him to portray her, in 2001, as a fretful housewife in a diamond diadem ....
Public Offering
May 01, 2007; ... ELIZABETH SCHAMBELAN TALKS WITH THE CURATORS OF SKULPTUR PROJEKTE MÜNSTER '07 EVERY TEN YEARS, sculpture's still-expanding field maps itself across a particular geographical terrain: the streets of Münster, Germany, where Skulptur Projekte Münster was inaugurated in 1977. The show, which ...
Annette Messager
May 01, 2007; ... PARIS CENTRE POMPIDOU June 6-September 17 Curated by Sophie Duplaix "Art is a secret," Annette Messager once said, "a secret shared between the individual and the collective." Indeed, Messager has long been protector and purveyor of many partial disclosures that ...
Steven Parrino
May 01, 2007; ... PALAIS DE TOKYO May24-August26 Curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler et al. Perhaps more than any other New York artist, Stcvcn Parrino-who died in a motorcycle accident in 2005-had a punk-rock attitude in art as well as in life. Wahler's tripartite exhibition, "l.a Marque ...
Orlan
May 01, 2007; ... SAINT-ÉTIENNE, FRANCE MUSÉE D'ART MODERNE DE SAINT-ÉTIENNE MÉTROPOLE May 26-August 26 Curated by Lór*nd Hegyi and Eugenio Viola Going where no one dared-or wanted-to go before, Orlan has long occupied the yawning gap between extreme body art and the postmodern ...
The Chimerical Horizon
May 01, 2007; ... STRASBOURG, FRANCE LE MUSÉE D'ART MODERNE ET CONTEMPORAIN May 10-September 9 Curated by Jean-Pierre Criqui The LA art world seems to be getting a lot more attention in France these days than it has been at home. Coming a year after "Los Angeles 1955-1985," the ...
A Theatre Without Theatre
May 01, 2007; ... BARCELONA MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA May 25-September 11 Curated by Bernard Blistène and Yann Chateigné The new prominence of performance in contemporary art has inspired many recent exhibitions dedicated to the medium. At MACBA, "A Theatre Without ...
Piero Manzoni
May 01, 2007; ... NAPLES MUSEO D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA DONNAREGINA May 19-September24 Curated by Germano Celant Of the postwar European artists responding to Duchamp's legacy, it was Milan's Piero Manzoni who most potently exam ined the notion of the artist as the nexus of meaning ....
Robert Gober
May 01, 2007; ... MÜNCHENSTEIN/BASEL SCHAULAGER May 12-October 14 Curated by Theodora Vischer and Robert Gober Robert Gober's outsize ambition has thus far been matched only by the commitment ot the institutions that have worked with him. Remember when the Museum of Contemporary ...
Jean-Frédéric Schnyder
May 01, 2007; ... BASEL MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST April 28-August 26 Curated by Philipp Kaiser Word has it that Swiss artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder is much admired by his countrymen Peter Fischli and David Weiss, yet his work-stateside, certainly-remains obscure. Since the late ...
Rachel Harrison
May 01, 2007; ... ZURICH MICROS MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST April 29-June 24 Curated by Heike Munder Often blobby, rarely slobby, Rachel Harnson's sculptures zig just when you expect them to zag. Neither easily formalist nor really readymade; seemingly discrete, though often grouped ...
Allora & Calzadilla
May 01, 2007; ... KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH June 2-August 12 Curated by Beatrix Ruf Having devoted more than a decade to a collaborative practice that combines pointed critique of socioeconomic inequity with humorous détournement and rigorous formal experiment, (Jennifer) Allorn & (Guillermo) ...
Martin Boyce
May 01, 2007; ... GENEVA CENTRE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN May 25-August 5 Curated by Katya Garcia-Anton Martin Boyce's shape-shifting .m brings back the ghosts of modernism: battered replicas of Fames cabinets; nighttime city scenes evoked in sketchy, shadowy installations of chain-link ...
Alfredo Jaar
May 01, 2007; ... LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND MUSÉE CANTONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS June 1-September 23 Curated by Nicole Schweizer It's a banner season for Alfredo Jaar: On the heels of a major survey of his work in his native Chile last fall (the first since he left the country a ...
Chen Zhen
May 01, 2007; ... VIENNA KUNSTHALLE WIEN May 25-September 2 Curated by Gerald Matt In 2000, Chen Zhen became the first major contemporary Chinese artist to die, at the age of forty-five, ending prematurely a career that had taken him from his native Shanghai to the center of a ...
Made in Germany
May 01, 2007; ... HANNOVER, GERMANY SPRENGEL MUSEUM HANNOVER/ KESTNERGESELLSCHAFT/ KUNSTVEREIN HANNOVER May 25-August 26 Curated by Stephan Berg, Veil Gömer, and Ulrich Krempel If you thought Berlin was where it's at, it is time to travel to Hannover to find out more about art ...
George Maciunas
May 01, 2007; ... BIELEFELD, GERMANY KUNSTHALLE BIELEFELD June 3-September 9 Curated by Thomas Kellein "Artist and Designer Organized Fluxus to Develop SoHo," read the headline of the New York Times' absurd yet oddly fitting 1978 obituary for George Maciunas. The self-described ...
John Baldessari: Music
May 01, 2007; ... BONN KUNSTMUSEUM BONN/ BONNER KUNSTVEREIN May 12-July 29 Curated by Stefan Gronert and Christina Végh A welcome start at addressing the imderexplored relationship between Conceptual art and sound, this dual-venue exhibition traces a musical motif that runs through ...
A. R. Penck
May 01, 2007; ... FRANKFURT SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE June 15-September 16 Curated by Ingrid Pfeiffer A. R. Penck's painterly language-a kind of visionary semaphore forged under the pressures of life in the GDR and refined in the hothouse of the 1980s art world after his move to the ...
Pensée Sauvage: On Human Freedom
May 01, 2007; ... FRANKFURTER KUNSTVEREIN May 25-July 8 Curated by Chus Martínez A pun, it has been said, is "the shortest distance between two straight lines." One suspects this initially baffling definitioniVf/H-quip might well appeal to the curator of "Pensée sauvage," who presents this ...
Josephine Meckseper
May 01, 2007; ... STUTTGART, GERMANY KUNSTMUSEUM STUTTGART July 14-0ctober 28 Curated by Simone Schimpf It's hardly surprising that the term radical chic appears in virtually every description of Josephine Mcckseper's work: The German-born artist sleekly packages protest as pose ...
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Positions in Color Field Painting
May 01, 2007; ... BADEN-BADEN, GERMANY STAATLICHE KUNSTHALLE July 21-September 30 Curated by Karola Gräßlin In New York, Color Field painting has suffered from a bail reputation for the past couple of decades-the legacy of provincial partisanship on behalf of an anointed few ....
Richard Avedon
May 01, 2007; ... HUMLEBJEK, DENMARK LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART August 24, 2007-January 13, 2008 Curated by HeIIe Crenzien Richard Avedon's achievement and his monumental influence on twentiethcentury photography rests on his reshaping of two distinct photographic genres: ...
Time of the Storytellers: Narrative and Distant Gaze in Post-Soviet Art
May 01, 2007; ... HELSINKI, FINLAND KIASMA June 21-September30 Curated by Viktor Misiano When Misiano organized the Venice Biennale's first-ever Central Asian Pavilion in 2005, his exhibition was revelatory for works evincing a geopolitical context in which modernism's legacy was ...
Le Corbusier: Art and Architecture
May 01, 2007; ... TOKYO MORI ART MUSEUM May 26-September 24 Curated by Fumio Nanjo Le Corhusier's life was filled with Manichaean dualities, and the Mori Art Museum will provide an overview of one of them: Corhu's painting, legendarily done only in the morning, versus his ...
Beautiful Loser: Op Art Revisited
May 01, 2007; ... Beautiful Loser: Op Art Revisited SO WHY OP NOW? Some forty years after the Museum of Modern Art, New York, introduced Op art to the American public with its landmark 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye," two museums have mounted historical shows looking back: "Optic Nerve: Perceptual ...
Allegories of Op
May 01, 2007; ... Allegories of Op FOR A LONG TIME OP ART luis occupied a position similar to that of the bouffant hairdo. Briefly fashion-forward, it quickly became an embarrassment. Almost as soon as Op debnted, it degenerated into one of the most visibly dated features of the '60s. Fleeting ...