Artforum back issues from January 2008:
Notes on Jokes
Jan 01, 2008; ... JOHN BALDESSARI, RADICAL PHILOSOPHER? You'd be forgiven for laughing out loud at the question, since the generally affable septuagenarian artist who some thirty-five years ago could be found humbly waving goodbye to sailboats (as they came into port) is not usually the first person authorities ...
LETTERS
Jan 01, 2008; ... Venice Revisited ROBERT STORR RESPONDS TO HIS CRITICS It is October, and I am back in the Serenissima for the awards ceremonies of the Fifty-second Venice Biennale. Today, I sit at a keyboard in an office above the Grand Canal listening to Charles Aznavour crooning "'Que c'est ...
State of Denial
Jan 01, 2008; ... State of Denial AMY TAUBIN ON 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS THIS IS ONE TOUGH FILM, this 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. As sparingly made as it is unsparing emotionally, Cristian Mungiu's second feature won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 07, confirming that a Romanian New Wave has indeed ...
The Eyes Had It
Jan 01, 2008; ... ROBERT PINCUS-WITTEN, JEFF KOONS, AND HAIM STEINBACH ON ILEANA SONNABEND (1914-2007) ROBERT PINCUS-WITTEN ILEANA SONNABEND'S obituary appeared in the New York Times of October 24, 2007. I read it with an equanimity that took me by surprise, having assumed that, after decades of ...
Good Vibrations
Jan 01, 2008; ... FOR ITS TWO PERFORMANCES of postwar avant-gardist David Tudor's Rainforest IV last fall at The Kitchen in New York, the group Composers Inside Electronics suspended a single wire object in the passageway between lobby and theater. Passing under this birdcagelike construction, entrants heard a ...
Sounding the Fury
Jan 01, 2008; ... JULIA BRYAN-WILSON ON KIRSTEN FORKERT AND MARK TRIBE "THE ART WORLD IS A POISON in the community of artists and must be removed by obliteration," asserted Carl Andre at a late-1960s meeting of the Art Workers' Coalition, calling for the demolition of a system that he deemed a source of ...
Mergers and Admonitions
Jan 01, 2008; ... SABETH BUCHMANN AND ACHIM HOCHDORFER ON THE GENERALI FOUNDATION AT A SEPTEMBER 2007 press conference announcing the merger of the Generali Foundation and the Bawag Foundation, representatives of the two Vienna art institutions stood smiling beneath the neon script of Cerith Wyn Evans's ...
Heather Rowe
Jan 01, 2008; ... 1 ONE WEEK (1920) In this short film, Buster Keaton attempts to construct a house from a number of mismarked boxes from the Portable House Company. The result is a warped architecture of misused parts: The walls are inverted, the floor becomes a springboard, the porch railing a ladder. Despite ...
Liam Gillick
Jan 01, 2008; ... WITTE DE WITH CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS January 19-March 24 Curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen With a practice that moves between installation and text, sculpture and architecture, Liam Gillick has long been invested in creating the basic ...
Cai Guo-Qiang
Jan 01, 2008; ... NEW YORK SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM February 22-May 28 Curated by Thomas Krens and Alexandra Munroe Feng shui, dragons, herbal medicine, and, most memorably, gunpowder: Fujianborn, New York-based artist Cai GuoQiang has been plying such traditional Chinese ...
Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today
Jan 01, 2008; ... MUSEUM OF MODERN ART March 2-May 12 Curated by Ann Temkin For centuries, if not longer, painters have typically deployed color either as a vehicle for optical pleasure or as a marker of expressive subjectivity (and sometimes both). Marcel Duchamp offered an alternative ...
Jan De Cock
Jan 01, 2008; ... NEW YORK MUSEUM OF MODERN ART January 23-April 14 Curated by Roxana Marcoci Belgian artist Jan De Cock is best known for large-scale, site-specific structures made of fiberboard in shades like pea green and burnt sienna. But many of these projects-all titled ...
2008 Whitney Biennial
Jan 01, 2008; ... WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART March 6-June 1 Curated by Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin These days, biennials around the world come and go with such banal frequency that one is tempted to regard them foremost as another dire way of marking the passage of time ....
Tomma Abts
Jan 01, 2008; ... NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART April 2-June 29 Curated by Laura Hoptman Modernism just won't go away. Tomma Abts is perhaps the best of the many painters practicing today who still find infinite resource in the complications of image and surface, of illusion and material ....
Paul Chan: The 7 Lights
Jan 01, 2008; ... NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART April 2-June 29 Curated by Massimiliano Gioni The upward trajectory of Paul Chan's career should hearten anyone who frets over the fate of passionate, politically committed art in these Bush-era endtimes. Barely a half decade into a wildly ...
Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer
Jan 01, 2008; ... NEW YORK NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART April 19-July 6 Curated by Richard Flood A recent commercial for the video game Guitar Hero III has Slash flaying his way out of the body of one player to conquer the other, as if masculine so-called heroics, rock 'n' roll ...
Barbara Bloom
Jan 01, 2008; ... INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY January 18-May 4 Curated by Brian Wallis Though organized by ICP exhibitions director Brian Wallis, "The Collections of Barbara Bloom" sounds less like an exhibition than like an artwork sui generis-an artist's reimagining of her own ...
Archive Fever
Jan 01, 2008; ... INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY January 18-May 4 Curated by Okwui Enwezor Despite the almost six-year interval between the two exhibitions, it is hard not to think of Okwui Enwezor's upcoming curatorial venture, "Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary ...
Flow
Jan 01, 2008; ... STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM April 2-June 29 Curated by Christine Y. Kim In 2001, Studio Museum curator Thelma Golden scandalized the art world by characterizing the work in "Freestyle," her survey of African-American art, as "post-black"-and consequently revitalized 1990s ...
Tom Burr
Jan 01, 2008; ... NEW YORK SCULPTURECENTER January 13-March 30 Curated by Mary Ceruti The empty platforms and upended chairs in Tom Burr's previous sculptural tableaux made visitors feel as though they had arrived after the party was over. Such a sense of belatedness will likely ...
Frederick Kiesler
Jan 01, 2008; ... DRAWING CENTER April 18-July 24 Curated by Dieter Bogner and Joao Ribas Over the course of the past decade, architecture has seen a rekindling of interest in organicism and biologically inspired methods. While such tendencies were never dominant in the modernist project, ...
The Puppet Show
Jan 01, 2008; ... PHILADELPHIA INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART January 18-March 30 Curated by Carin Kuoni and Ingrid Schaffner Close on the heels of Team America and Avenue Q, an unlikely puppet-art Zeitgeist seemed to be dawning a few years back when marionettes, dolls, and dummies ...
The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image
Jan 01, 2008; ... WASHINGTON, DC HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN Opens February 14 Curated by Kerry Brougher, Anne Ellegood, Kelly Gordon, and Kristen Hileman In the age of digital convergence, film is increasingly becoming a touchstone for new media and video art-no longer ...
Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel
Jan 01, 2008; ... COLUMBUS, OH WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS February 2-April 13 Curated by Helen Molesworth The Pandora's box of painting continues to let loose spirits from the 1960s and '70s, changing the way we think about our recent past. Helen Molesworth, formerly chief curator ...
Trisha Brown
Jan 01, 2008; ... MINNEAPOLIS WALKER ART CENTER April 18-August 17 Curated by Peter Eeley Dubbing this the "Year of Trisha," the Walker will celebrate the doyenne of postmodern choreography with an exhibition that charts a course from Brown's fabled days with the Judson Dance ...
Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement
Jan 01, 2008; ... LOS ANGELES LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART April 6-September 1 Curated by Howard N. Fox, Rita Gonzalez, and Chon A. Noriega The paranoid border patrol of the so-called Minutemen is probably one reason for this show's title, as is the anemic response of the ...
California Video
Jan 01, 2008; ... J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM March 15-June 8 Curated by Glenn Phillips In 2006, the Getty Research Institute acquired the important Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive, suddenly (and quietly) incorporating one of the largest institutional collections of video art into its own ...
R. B. Kitaj
Jan 01, 2008; ... LOS ANGELES SKIRBALL CULTURAL CENTER January 11-March 30 Curated by Tal Gozani "'Jewish painters shd never calm down,' said God!" R. B. Kitaj wrote in his 2007 book, The second Diasporist Manifesto. And everything this controversial, strongwilled, brilliantly ...
Michael Asher
Jan 01, 2008; ... SANTA MONICA, CA SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART January 26-April 12 Curated by Elsa Longhauser Since the late 1960s, Michael Asher has created a great number of brilliant installations and interventions that pushed the paradigms of Minimalism into social space and ...
Steina
Jan 01, 2008; ... SANTA FE, NM SITE SANTA FE February 16-May 11 Curated by Laura Steward Heon and Liza Statton For Steina, seeing has never been believing. The video pioneer instead throws vision into doubt, distortion, and feedback-underscoring the electronic image's reliance on ...
The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art, and Politics
Jan 01, 2008; ... SAN FRANCISCO YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS March 29-June 29 Curated by Berin Golonu With feminism surveys on both the East and West coasts, 2007 seemed like the Year of the Woman in the art world. Thankfully, that "year" may not be over come 2008, which ...
Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life
Jan 01, 2008; ... SAN FRANCISCO CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS February 8-April 5 Curated by Jens Hoffmann and Paul McCarthy Fresh from cutting a cultural swathe across Europe with shows in Munich, Stockholm, and London, among other cities, Paul McCarthy returns to his ...
¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today
Jan 01, 2008; ... MONTREAL MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS January 31-June 8 Curated by Nathalie Bondil When Alfred Barr organized his landmark 1944 MOMA survey "Modern Cuban Painters," the island's most well known painter, Wifredo Lam, wary of being labeled "regional," refused to ...
Simon Starling
Jan 01, 2008; ... TORONTO POWER PLANT March 1-May 11 Curated by Gregory Burke Simon Starling is the master of productive detours. By changing or recontextualizing objects of various types, he grants them the power to tell new stories in which personal histories are rerouted to ...
Tarsila
Jan 01, 2008; ... SÃO PAULO PINACOTECA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO January 20-March 23 Curated by Regina Teixeira de Barros Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), known simply as Tarsila, was a central figure of Brazilian modernism; her husband, Oswald de Andrade, authored the famous 1928 ...
Pious Reflections
Jan 01, 2008; ... JOSEPH LEO KOERNER ON "DUTCH PRIMITIVES" FROM THE VAULT IN THE EARLY 1400s, painters in the Low Countries created a new species of image. With wood panels as their favored support, and handling their medium of oil-based pigments in unprecedented ways, they crafted glazed and ...
Juan Muñoz
Jan 01, 2008; ... LONDON Juan Muñoz TATE MODERN January 24-April 27 Curated by Sheena Wagstaff Juan Muñoz, who died prematurely just a few weeks after his installation Double Bind opened in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2001, described his activity as that of a storyteller ....
Peter Doig
Jan 01, 2008; ... Peter Doig TATE BRITAIN February 5-April 27 Curated by Judith Nesbitt Peter Doig coaxes a languid air from tremulous surfaces, and this may make him closer to the painters of the 1890s than to those of the 1990s, the decade in which he emerged. His slow unspooling ...
Double Agent
Jan 01, 2008; ... Double Agent INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS February 14-April 6 Curated by Claire Bishop and Mark Sladen Despite the title, put aside thoughts of espionage. In the sense intended by the ICA's Mark Sladen and guest curator Claire Bishop-who has written eloquently ...
Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art
Jan 01, 2008; ... Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art BARBICAN ART GALLERY March 6-May 18 Curated by Francesco Manacorda and Lydia Yee The opening chapter of Thierry de Duve's 1998 Kant After Duchamp-which inspired this offbeat group show-is a rare example of art theory as seen ...
Niki de Saint Phalle
Jan 01, 2008; ... LIVERPOOL, UK Niki de Saint Phalle TATE LIVERPOOL February 1-May 5 Curated by Simon Groom and Kyla McDonald The chirpiest-seeming of feminist art stars, French artist Niki de Saint Phalle is not often associated with bloodthirst: "In 1961 I shot at: daddy, ...
Jack Pierson
Jan 01, 2008; ... DUBLIN Jack Pierson IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART March 12-May 18 Curated by Richard D. Marshall Jack Pierson first came to broad attention in the early 1990s, when the art market was at its nadir and much of the freshest new art reflected correlative tempers ...
Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Jan 01, 2008; ... PARIS Eija-Liisa Ahtila JEU DE PAUME January 22-March 30 Curated by Véronique Dabin Emerging in the 1990s-the decade when moving image-based art reached a kind of worldwide zenith-Eija-Liisa Ahtila earned unique respect for her emotionally charged films, ...
Loris Gréaud
Jan 01, 2008; ... Loris Gréaud PALAIS DE TOKYO February 14-May 4 Curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler Granting Loris Gréaud domain over its entire exhibition space-an unprecedented opportunity for a French artist under thirty-the Palais de Tokyo will present "Cellar Door," a show with ...
Claude Closky
Jan 01, 2008; ... VITRY-SUR-SEINE, FRANCE Claude Closky MUSÉE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DU VAL-DE-MARNE March 27-June 22 Cu rated by Frank La my "I like the kind of artifice that gives no authority to form," quipped French artist Claude Closky, whose multimedia output includes a ...
Wolf Vostell
Jan 01, 2008; ... NÎMES, FRANCE Wolf Vostell CARRÉ D'ART February 13-May 12 Curated by Inge Baecker and Françoise Cohen Wolf Vostell was not only a pioneer of video art and "dé-coll/age" but also the founder of the first museum of Fluxus. This latter project, an unlikely ...
Alice Creischer
Jan 01, 2008; ... BARCELONA Alice Creischer MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA February 1-May 18 Curated by Bartomeu Marí Since the mid-1990s, Alice Creischer has contested official representations of capitalism and liberal democracy by proposing historical ...
Greenwashing
Jan 01, 2008; ... TURIN, ITALY Greenwashing FONDAZIONE SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO February 28-May 4 Curated by Maria Bonacossa and Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánapa Luna) With a title like "Greenwashing: Environment-Perils, Promises, and Perplexities," one might expect ...
Art Day's Night
Jan 01, 2008; ... INTERNATIONAL NEWS BRIAN SHOLIS ON THE 5TH BERLIN BIENNIAL IF THERE IS ANY CONSENSUS regarding the contemporary mega-exhibition, it's that it is in need of reinvention. And, increasingly, a focus on performance and pedagogy seems to offer one way forward. The prime example here ...
Action Painting
Jan 01, 2008; ... BASEL FONDATION BEYELER January 27-May 12 Curated by Ulf Küster In his influential 1952 article "American Action Painters," Harold Rosenberg codified the characteristics of a burgeoning generation of painters, noting, most famously, that they approached the canvas ...
Ferdinand Hodler
Jan 01, 2008; ... BERN, SWITZERLAND KUNSTMUSEUM BERN April 9-August 10 Curated by Katharina Schmidt and Matthias Frehner Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) was born in Bern, so this retrospective honors a native son, even if Hodler's artistic life didn't really begin until he moved to ...
Europop
Jan 01, 2008; ... ZURICH KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH February 15-May 12 Curated by Tobia Bezzola The lollipop-wielding bodybuilder in Richard Hamilton's iconic 1956 collage may explain why Hamilton is often credited with inventing Pop art, but the artist was hardly mining that vein alone ....
Max Bill
Jan 01, 2008; ... WINTERTHUR, SWITZERLAND KUNSTMUSEUM WINTERTHUR January 20-May 12 Curated by Dieter Schwarz Max Bill once reigned as the supreme heir of the prewar tradition of (European) geometric abstract art. In recent decades, however, his name has evoked nothing but the ...
5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art
Jan 01, 2008; ... BERLIN VARIOUS VENUES April 5-June 15 Curated by Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic Responding to the challenge of the biennial format, curators are increasingly taking such shows into uncharted territory. Adam Szymczyk, director of the Kunsthalle Basel and a ...
Sharon Lockhart
Jan 01, 2008; ... HAMBURG HAMBURG KUNSTVEREIN April 12-June 22 Curated by Yilmaz Dziewior From her early staged images with vaguely intimated story lines to her recent, structuralist-influenced films, Sharon Lockhart's work has consistently staked out an ambiguous territory between ...
Adrian Paci
Jan 01, 2008; ... HANNOVER, GERMANY KUNSTVEREIN HANNOVER April 19-June 15 Curated by Sara Arrhenius and Martin Engler For more than a decade, Milan-based artist Adrian Paci has been exploring the themes of migration and displacement from a personal-and at times painfulperspective ....
Ulla von Brandenburg
Jan 01, 2008; ... DÜSSELDORF KUNSTVEREIN FÜR DIE RHEINLANDE UND WESTFALEN DÜSSELDORF February 16-April 20 Curated by Vanessa Joan Müller Like some other artists for whom the world is a stage-to paraphrase the title of the Tate Modern group exhibition in which she recently ...
Falling Right into Place: The Fold in Contemporary Art
Jan 01, 2008; ... KREFELD, GERMANY MUSEUM HAUS LANGE AND KAISER WILHELM MUSEUM March 2-May 25 Curated by Sylvia Martin Taking a cue from Gilles Deleuze's invocation of the fold as a basic ordering unit-in turn borrowed from Leibniz's theory of the monad-"Falling Right into Place" ...
All Inclusive: A Tourist World
Jan 01, 2008; ... FRANKFURT SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE January 30-May 4 Curated by Matthias Ulrich In an era when the entire world seems to be on the move, tourism points to the double bind underlying our culture's fetishization of both mobility and locality. And if tourism is increasingly ...
Angela Bulloch
Jan 01, 2008; ... MUNICH STÄDTISCHE GALERIE IM LENBACHHAUS UND KUNSTBAU February 16-May 18 Curated by Matthias Mühling The paradox of Angela Bulloch's art is that while her works are difficult to apprehend perceptually, they depend on heightened sensory responses for their ...
Time & Place: Rio de Janeiro, 1956-1964
Jan 01, 2008; ... STOCKHOLM MODERNA MUSEET January 19-April 6 Curated by Paolo Venancio Filho By the 1950s, the Brazilian avant-garde was undeniably cosmopolitan, characterized by sympathetic but competing movements in two cities: Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. "Time & Place" ...
Man with a Movie Camera
Jan 01, 2008; ... PHIL COLLINS AND KARAOKE were both born in the 1970s, the decade during which, according to the novelist Michael Cunningham, dreams of revolution faded and people began to dance. And dancing is at the center of the project that is probably Collins's best known to date, the seven-hour ...
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn
Jan 01, 2008; ... 1000 WORDS TALK ABOUT ALL TOGETHER NOW, 2008 "ONCE UPON A TIME, or maybe twice, there was an unearthly paradise," begins the Beatles's 1968 animated extravaganza, Yellow Submarine. As the opening line's turn on the cliche' suggests, visions of other worlds-past, future, or ...
Modifying the Grammar
Jan 01, 2008; ... PAOLO VIRNO'S WORKS ON VIRTUOSITY AND EXODUS Paolo Virno's intricate theorizations of performativity have increasingly been invoked in discussions of contemporary art, but all too often at the price of having his ideas' larger political and social backdrop overlooked. In anticipation of ...
A New Geometry
Jan 01, 2008; ... ITALY'S AUTONOMIA MOVEMENT was less a group of people or an organization to which one belonged than a milieu or network of spaces through which elements of the Italian "extreme" Left moved. Though in many areas of the country autonomia had its base in the student and women's movements, what ...