Artforum back issues from July 2008:
A New Novel
Jul 01, 2008; ... IF ONLY IN THE SPIRIT of rhetorical gamesmanship, it seems entirely worthwhile to ask whether the concept of the avant-garde, or neo-avant-garde, is not totally irrelevant when it comes to discussions of artistic production today-even if considered simply a kind of measure against which the ...
In the Weave of Reason
Jul 01, 2008; ... TONY OURSLER AND MIKE KELLEY ON DAVID ASKEVOLD (1940-2008) TONY OURSLER MY PERSONAL COSMOLOGY of Conceptualism starts with snakes: David Askevold's Kepler's Music of the Spheres Played by Six Snakes, 1971-74, to be exact. As a student at CalArts in 1977, a time when the art ...
The Ends of the Parabola
Jul 01, 2008; ... The Ends of the Parabola KEVIN PRATT ON SANFORD KWINTER'S FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM: ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN CULTURE, BY SANFORD KWINTER. BARCELONA/NEW YORK: ACTAR, 2008.196 PAGES. $33. WIDELY RECOGNIZED in academic circles as an architectural polymath, Sanford ...
LETTERS
Jul 01, 2008; ... MARKET CORRECTION AS PAUL MCCARTHY'S principal representative for many years, I read Sarah Thornton's "Market Index" article on McCarthy's work with particular interest. After an introduction to his early career, she states, "From 1992 onward, McCarthy had no shortage of exhibition ...
Rough Ride
Jul 01, 2008; ... Rough Ride AMY TAUBIN ON KEN JACOBS IN 2006, KEN JACOBS took a one-minute film produced in 1903 by Thomas Edison and made of it an infernal machine. The title of the Edison film is Razzle Dazzle. Jacobs calls his version Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World. The subtitle refers to the ...
Just a Gigolo
Jul 01, 2008; ... Just a Gigolo JAMES QUANDT ON THE FILMS OF JACQUES NOLOT IN THE FILMS OF JACQUES NOLOT, weakness of the flesh implies bodily decline as much as unbidden desire. Nolot's unflinching camera looks with equal asperity and tenderness on the corpse of an old woman with its hairless ...
One and All One
Jul 01, 2008; ... One and All One HOWARD SINGERMAN ON SHERRIE LEVINE AND THE MOTHER OF US ALL FROM THE BEGINNING, Sherrie Levine's work has been about names and how to count them. Depending on how one took her early appropriations, they seemed to promise a practice without origins or names and, as ...
Art of Authenticity
Jul 01, 2008; ... Art of Authenticity CATHERINE WOOD ON "OUR LITERAL SPEED" CHAIRING A TALK at the Frieze Art Fair in London in 2006, art historian and critic Claire Bishop observed that the live panel discussion had, in recent years, replaced performance art as the home of "authenticity." ...
Bidden City
Jul 01, 2008; ... SEAN KELLER ON THE BEIJING OLYMPICS THE OLYMPIC GAMES as we know them were born out of a late-nineteenth-century marriage of classical mythology and political science fiction. They decree that every four years all the nations of the world will set aside their political struggles and come ...
New Monuments
Jul 01, 2008; ... KELLER EASTERLING ON NORMAN FOSTER'S CRYSTAL ISLAND IF YOU E-MAIL Norman Foster's London-based architecture firm to request information about his design for Crystal Island, a project recently approved for construction in Moscow, you will receive, with no accompanying note, a terse list ...
In Reflection
Jul 01, 2008; ... ANDREW HULTKRANS ON THE GLASS HOUSE CONVERSATIONS PHILIP JOHNSON is welcoming houseguests again, if only as (g)host emeritus. Since last summer, the Glass House (1949)-Johnson's master's thesis and country home in New Canaan, Connecticut-has been opened to the great unwashed via guided ...
Peripheral Visions
Jul 01, 2008; ... JESSICA MORGAN ON BETWEEN BRIDGES AND LONDON'S ALTERNATIVE SPACES ALONG WITH THE ARRIVAL of the supersize gallery in London, the past few years have witnessed the opening of a handful of galleries that barely warrant the term space, given that they are so entirely lacking in square ...
Past Imperfect
Jul 01, 2008; ... NIKKI COLUMBUS ON HOME WORKS IV IN BEIRUT IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, group shows of Middle Eastern artists have become increasingly frequent in the West: This spring, "Les Inquiets" (The Anxious) took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; last year saw "In Focus," three interrelated shows ...
Gilty Pleasures
Jul 01, 2008; ... MEREDITH MARTIN ON THE ROCOCO AROUND 1720, the French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau painted a signboard for his dealer's shop that depicted an idealized view of the gallery on Paris's Pont Notre-Dame. Downplaying its commercial status, Watteau portrayed the shop as a setting for elite ...
Memo from Turner
Jul 01, 2008; ... JONATHAN CRARY ON J. M. W. TURNER IN RECENT DECADES, the occasion of a major Turner exhibition has invariably elicited outpourings of admiring, even marveling commentary on the artist's work, and the response to the current traveling retrospective-soon to open at the Metropolitan Museum ...
Rites of Silence
Jul 01, 2008; ... JOHANNA BURTON ON THE ART OF WADE GUYTON JUST WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS? Poised in front of Wade Guyton's work, admirers and detractors alike often find themselves asking the same question. It's not so much a query regarding the artist's character-though of course it's partially that, ...
Nico Muhly
Jul 01, 2008; ... New York-based composer Nico Muhly has worked with composers ranging from Philip Glass to Björk, and has written pieces for the American Ballet Theatre and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His compositions have debuted at venues such as New York's Carnegie Hall, the Whitney Museum of American ...
The New Yorker
Jul 01, 2008; ... DEBORAH SOLOMON SPEAKS WITH PETER SCHJELDAHL To mark the publication of Peter Schjeldahl's new volume, Let's See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (Thames & Hudson, 2008), author Deborah Solomon spoke with the New York-based art critic-recipient of the 2008 Clark Prize for ...
Procedural Matters
Jul 01, 2008; ... ANDREA FRASER ON THE ART OF MICHAEL ASHER I PURCHASED MICHAELASHER'S Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 soon after it was published in 1983. At the time, it was the most expensive book I had ever bought. I read it from cover to cover and made lots of notes in the margins. It had a ...
Into the Labyrinth
Jul 01, 2008; ... WITH THE PASSING of French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet this winter, the world of postmodern literature lost one of its first (and last) great innovatorsone whose influence extended irrevocably into the realms of theory, film, and art (and particularly its Conceptualist and Minimalist strands) ....
Double Projection
Jul 01, 2008; ... IT IS HARDLY SURPRISING that Alain Robbe-Grillet should have moved from his particular conception and practice of the French New Novel to the cinema. In literary works such as The Voyeur (1955) and Jealousy (1957), this nouveau romancier delighted in patterned descriptions of nature so plastic ...
Of Another Order
Jul 01, 2008; ... SHORTLY BEFORE he passed away, Alain Robbe-Grillet was still thumbing his nose at society. His last published work, Un Roman sentimental (A Sentimental Novel, 2007), which he called a "fairy tale for adults," describes young schoolgirls subjected to the worst sexual abuses-this in and for a ...
Knots
Jul 01, 2008; ... ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET ABUNDANTLY wrote and spoke in the margins of his novels-giving interviews, writing articles, even inserting self-referential mirrors into the novels themselves. He used metadiscourse the way photographers use captions, in order to help readers know what the text was about and ...
The Geometry of the Pressant
Jul 01, 2008; ... THE OBITUARIES Alain Robbe-Grillet received in the British press depicted him as a significant but ultimately eccentric novelist, whose work forswore any attempt to be "believable" or to engage with the real world in a "realistic" way. In taking this line, the obituarists displayed an ...
Citizen Hamilton
Jul 01, 2008; ... We rarely associate the Independent Group, much less Pop art, with political commitment, yet politics has been a persistent concern of Richard Hamilton's work for fifty years. "Protest Pictures," an exhibition on view at Inverleith House in Edinburgh from July 31 through October 12, gathers his ...
Maria Lassnig
Jul 01, 2008; ... 1000 WORDS TALKS ABOUT HER EXHIBITION AT THE SERPENTINE GALLERY IN LONDON THE ART-HISTORICAL CATEGORY of "late work," which emerged around the end of the eighteenth century, has itself begun to show signs of age. Strictly speaking, the kind of major, self-contained phase of ...
Traveling Images
Jul 01, 2008; ... T. J. DEMOS ON THE ART OF HITO STEYERL IT IS THE SHEER VERSATILITY and multiplicity of global media-the circulatory flux of images, their supple and instantaneous distribution networks-that render the task of documentary filmmaking today more fraught than ever. Or so argues the ...
Michael Ned Holte on Alice Könitz
Jul 01, 2008; ... OPENINGS Michael Ned Holte on Alice Könitz THE GLENDALE FREEWAY, a short section of California State Route 2, is relatively underused by Los Angeles standards and terminates abruptly at the threshold between the neighborhoods of Echo Park and Silver Lake. Originally built in the ...
Gilda Williams on Daniel Silver
Jul 01, 2008; ... OPENINGS Gilda Williams on Daniel Silver MUCH OF LONDON-BASED SCULPTOR Daniel Silver's work occupies an inbetween state-between complete and incomplete, between handmade and mass-produced, between artistic object and castoff. For an exhibition at Ibid Projects in London this past ...
Olafur Eliasson
Jul 01, 2008; ... Olafur Eliasson SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART AND MUSEUM OF MODERN ART/P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER, NEW YOR MOST SOLO EXHIBITIONS require little explanation of why or how they came to be. Their logic inevitably seems to fit some well-established category: There is the ...
Whitney Biennial
Jul 01, 2008; ... Whitney Biennial WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK IN AMY GRANAT AND DREW HEITZLER'S 2007 double-screen film, T.S.O.Y. W., on view in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, a motorcyclist travels from Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, to the Mojave ...
Bruce Nauman
Jul 01, 2008; ... NEW YORK Bruce Nauman SPERONE WESTWATER Bruce Nauman's recent exhibition at Sperone Westwater was introduced by Untitled (Study for Slow Angle Walk [Beckett Walk]), 1968-69, a small, diagrammatic pencil drawing in which lines and arcs of various densities are interspersed ...
5th Berlin Biennial
Jul 01, 2008; ... 5th Berlin Biennial VARIOUS VENUES THE BIENNIAL FORMAT may exert a more decisive influence on the field of contemporary art than any other kind of exhibition today, but such shows are also regularly criticized on account of their instrumentalization in the service of both ...
"Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement"
Jul 01, 2008; ... "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement" LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART IN 1972, under cover of night, three members of Asco, the Chicano conceptual-art collective from East Los Angeles, tagged the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with their last names. The work was ...
Lucas Samaras
Jul 01, 2008; ... Lucas Samaras PACEWILDENSTEIN Self-proclaimed "urban hermit" Lucas Samaras is well known for his innumerable self-portraits. Some of these are photographs, most are paintings, but perhaps the most famous is his series "Photo Transformations," 1973-76, which was made by ...
Ashley Bickerton
Jul 01, 2008; ... Ashley Bickerton LEHMANN MAUPIN Ashley Bickerton's art has always operated within a dialectic of moralism and depravity. His paintings of open-shirted, liquor-swilling Caucasian tourists partying with voluptuous hula girls read as expliciteven dogmatic-condemnations of excess, ...
Katy Moran
Jul 01, 2008; ... Katy Moran ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY Katy Moran's solo debut at Andrea Rosen Gallery proved as "riveting" as the press release trumpeted, despite the fact that nobody could quite agree on what her abstract paintings are about, where they come from, or what they finally depict. Brushed ...
Eleanor Antin
Jul 01, 2008; ... Eleanor Antin RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS That Helen of Troy had a face beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships is a myth so often reiterated that it may as well be true. Interpretations of the rest of her story are more divergent: She was a true innocent, abducted by Paris ...
Martha Wilson
Jul 01, 2008; ... Martha Wilson MITCHELL ALGUS GALLERY Martha Wilson is best known as the founding director of Franklin Furnace, the archive and performance institution that has been a necessary part of the New York art world since 1976. Considerably less familiar is her work as a Conceptual ...
Carroll Dunham
Jul 01, 2008; ... Carroll Dunham SKARSTEDT GALLERY Carroll Dunham would have been accorded serious consideration for membership in the first Postminimalist generation on the basis of the remarkable paintings in this recent revisitation were it not for the fact of his youth-or his seeming ...
Floriano Vecchi
Jul 01, 2008; ... Floriano Vecchi THE ITALIAN ACADEMY FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN AMERICA, CASA ITALIANA, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY The name Floriano Vecchi is less than familiar these days, yet he played an intriguing and significant role in the evolution of Abstract Expressionism and, even more ...
Brian Jungen
Jul 01, 2008; ... Brian Jungen CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY What separates true artistic development from mere rehashing? At what point should we expect established artists to move beyond the ideas that brought them their initial success? Brian Jungen's second solo exhibition at casey Kaplan Gallery ...
Susan Philipsz
Jul 01, 2008; ... Susan Philipsz TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY Many artists who use appropriation do so as a strategy for ironic commentary, parody, or critical reflection. Susan Philipsz is not among them. The reason has to do with her medium as much as her attitude: The forty-three-year-old Scottish ...
Heimo Zobernig
Jul 01, 2008; ... Heimo Zobernig FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY Heimo Zobernig's recent exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery was his solo debut there, but it was not the first time that the Austrian artist had paraded his naked body about: His 1996 show at the Renaissance Society in Chicago featured ...
Angelo Filomeno
Jul 01, 2008; ... Angelo Filomeno GALERIE LELONG Opulent symbolism does not equal erudition, but in the world of contemporary art we sometimes let things slide. We allow baroque excess to stand in for meaning, symbols to become trademarks that suggest generic "significance." A diamond-encrusted ...
Muzi Quawson
Jul 01, 2008; ... Muzi Quawson YOSSI MILO GALLERY From the recent blockbusters Knocked Up and Juno to the media hounding of Katie Holmes and Suri Cruise, America seems to be in the grip of a strange obsession with young mothers. Muzi Quawson's first solo show in New York invoked this fascination ...
Louis Camnitzer
Jul 01, 2008; ... Louis Camnitzer ALEXANDER GREY ASSOCIATES The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has made public the last words of all death row inmates executed since 1982. The statements are published, with a chilling evocation of social networking sites, in the online profile of each ...
Massimo Vitali
Jul 01, 2008; ... Massimo Vitali BONNI BENRUBI GALLERY In an 1867 letter to a friend, Eugène Boudin bemoaned an influx of vacationers to his native Normandy coast, writing, "This beach at Trouville which used to be my delight, now ... seems like a frightful masquerade. One would have to be a ...
Blake Rayne
Jul 01, 2008; ... Blake Rayne MIGUEL ABREU GALLERY In planning the Blue Tower, a luxury-condominium complex on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Bernard Tschumi Architects faced, according to the firm's website, a particular challenge: "to create an original architectural statement while simultaneously ...
Susan MacWilliam
Jul 01, 2008; ... Susan MacWilliam JACK THE PELICAN PRESENTS Artists who employ inherently intriguing subject matter set themselves a knotty challenge: how to avoid that fascination becoming the be-all and end-all of their work, leaving any individual twist looking superficial or superfluous next ...
Mark Van Yetter and Matt Hoyt
Jul 01, 2008; ... Mark Van Yetter and Matt Hoyt DISPATCH Dispatch, a small Chinatown gallery established in 2007 by regular collaborators Howie Chen and Gabrielle Giattino, presents itself with formidable seriousness: "Dispatch offers a model for curatorial production: an office for receiving and ...
Stephen Barker
Jul 01, 2008; ... BOSTON Stephen Barker BERNARD TOALE GALLERY Beginning with "Night Swimming," 1999, a series of grainy photographs documenting the murky corners of Manhattan's gay sex clubs, Stephen Barker has focused his camera on the eroticism of anonymous desire. His latest project, ...
John Phillips
Jul 01, 2008; ... CHICAGO John Phillips TONY WIGHT GALLERY The coupling of clear form with an at times confused figure-ground relationship is a hallmark of John Phillips's oils. In this recent exhibition of nine new works, the artist's newly introduced battle was between cranked-up color ...
Michael Piazza
Jul 01, 2008; ... GLEN ELLYN, IL Michael Piazza GAHLBERG GALLERY, COLLEGE OF DUPAGE Michael Piazza's death in 2006 robbed Chicago of one of its most persistent cultural and social activists, an artist and teacher who believed that creativity could be a corrective and redemptive force with ...
Phil Bender
Jul 01, 2008; ... LAKEWOOD, CO Phil Bender THE LABORATORY OF ART AND IDEAS AT BELMAR Phil Bender might best be described as a pure assemblagist, his art being derived wholly from collecting and ordering. The term assemblage typically denotes work constructed from found objects that have ...
Will Yackulic
Jul 01, 2008; ... SAN FRANCISCO Will Yackulic GREGORY LIND GALLERY The ten works on paper in Will Yackulic's second solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery have a motif in common: one or two spheres that float in the composition's upper center. In some of the pieces, these are positioned above ...
Jordan Kantor
Jul 01, 2008; ... Jordan Kantor RATIO 3 GALLERY How much do we have to know about the backstory of a work of art in order to understand and appreciate it? Jordan Kantor's enigmatic paintings seem to pose this question explicitly, by challenging viewers' expectations about the mediation of images ....
Toby Ziegler
Jul 01, 2008; ... LOS ANGELES Toby Ziegler PATRICK PAINTER INC. Hovering before visitors to British artist Toby Ziegler's recent US solo debut was True North (all works 2007), one of several sculptures made by joining planes of corrugated cardboard into faceted, volumetric forms. Painted ...
Wally Hedrick
Jul 01, 2008; ... Wally Hedrick THE BOX The first and most monumental of numerous black monochromes featured in this timely and well-edited survey of works by Wally Hedrick, who died in 2003 at the age of seventy-five, is War Room, 1967-68/2002, a massive volume enclosed on four sides by eight ...
Paulette Phillips
Jul 01, 2008; ... TORONTO Paulette Phillips DIAZ CONTEMPORARY ENTREZ LENTEMENT. That warning is accompanied, in Paulette Phillips's prints Knock Knock One, Two, and Three (all works 2008), by images of overlapping photographs depicting a building's interior. Blurred details and small holes ...
Emanuel Nassar
Jul 01, 2008; ... SÃO PAULO Emanuel Nassar GALERlA MILLAN Emanuel Nassar grew up in Belém, capital of the state of Pará in the north of Brazil, part of the Amazon region, and he continues to live there as well as in São Paulo. Celebrated as one of the major figures in contemporary ...
Thomas Scheibitz
Jul 01, 2008; ... LONDON Thomas Scheibitz CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE Writing about Thomas Scheibitz nearly a decade ago, my thought was that he was quintessentially a painter. His recent exhibition in London, "About 90 Elements/TOD IM DSCHUNGEL (Death in the Jungle)," a version of which was ...
Jimmy De Sana
Jul 01, 2008; ... Jimmy De Sana WlLKlNSON GALLERY Taken when the American photographer Jimmy De Sana (1950-1990) was between the ages of just twenty and twenty-two, the small, blackand-white images in 101 Nudes, 1972, seem to document simultaneously this talented artist's fumbling discoveries in ...
Craig Mulholland
Jul 01, 2008; ... GLASGOW Craig Mulholland VARIOUS VENUES Scottish artist Craig Mulholland's eloquent new series "Grandes et Petites Machines," 2006-2008, spanned three Glasgow venues-Sorcha Dallas gallery, the Mackintosh Gallery at the Glasgow School of Art, and the Glasgow Film ...
McDermott & McGough
Jul 01, 2008; ... DUBLIN McDermott & McGough IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Using obsolete printing techniques and an 8x10" camera, David McDermott and Peter McGough in thé 1980s and '90s, made photographs that look like they were produced a century ago. This display of 120 small pictures ...