Alexander Alberro

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  print September 2006

  1,000 WORDS: SERGIO VEGA

  ENTERING SERGIO VEGA’S Tropicalounge, 2002–2005, is like walking into a diorama. Designer furniture, potted exotic plants, a harmonious color code, and the sounds of smooth bossa nova create a cordial ambience that is augmented by the scent of potpourri and by the ensemble’s many interactive objects and spaces. The vivid manner in which Vega’s sculptural installation engages a visitor’s senses recalls the Tropicália of Hélio Oiticica and its legacies in the work of artists such as Cildo Meireles and Artur Barrio. But Tropicalounge is also oddly incongruous. What is one to make of the cockeyed

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  previews January 2004

  Behind the Facts: Interfunktionen

  Structured around some of the most scrupulously unscrupulous projects highlighted in the twelve issues of the groundbreaking international journal Interfunktionen, this exhibition captures the enormous transformation of art that took place between 1966 and 1975 and crystallizes the exchange of ideas between Europe and the US in those years when both ends were burning.

  Structured around some of the most scrupulously unscrupulous projects highlighted in the twelve issues of the groundbreaking international journal Interfunktionen, this exhibition captures the enormous transformation of art that took place between 1966 and 1975 and crystallizes the exchange of ideas between Europe and the US in those years when both ends were burning. The one hundred works on view, by Günther Brus, Richard Long, Yvonne Rainer, and thirty-six other artists, were made during the journal’s run (though not all were featured in it) and were inspired by the

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  print Summer 2003

  THE FOX: ONE YEAR UNDER THE MAST

  In this occasional series, Artforum looks back on alternative magazines and journals whose importance for contemporary art—whether in introducing a new discourse or galvanizing a scene—is often matched by the brevity of their life span.

  IN THE FALL OF 1974, JOSEPH KOSUTH, SARAH Charlesworth, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, Andrew Menard, and Mel Ramsden—all members of the New York wing of the art collective Art & Language (ALNY)—began to meet two or three times a week at The Local, a small basement bar in Greenwich Village operated by Mickey Ruskin (the former owner of Max’s Kansas City), in

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  print September 2001

  INSIDE THE WHITE BOX: ASPEN 5+6

  STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ'S DREAM of the ideal book, a book capable of encapsulating the entire universe, depended on a recognition of the meaning of format that moved against the “artificial unity that used to be based on the square measurements of the book.” The late-nineteenth-century poet called for a precisely reckoned and designed volume in which everything was to be “hesitation, disposition of parts, their alterations and relationships”—one in which typography and even the folding of the pages would achieve an ideational, analytic, and expressive significance. In the twentieth century, this

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  print September 2000

  Ulrike Ottinger

  ULRIKE OTTINGER'S 1978 Portrait of Two Women Drinkers describes a silent encounter between strangers on opposite sides of a café window. The immaculately and fashionably dressed figure in bright yellow inside the café raises a glass of cognac to the shabby-looking woman outside, who touches the window in a gesture of eager longing. Ottinger, a prominent force in the New German Cinema, shot this picture during the making of her 1979 film Ticket of No Return, a meditation on Berlin and drinking. It is not a still from the movie: Ottinger describes her photographs as “visual notes” that help her

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  print April 2000

  Valie Export

  IN 1967, WHEN Waltraud Höllinger changed her name to Valie Export and began producing public performance pieces as a fellow traveler of the Viennese Actionists, notoriety came quickly. In Aktionhose: Genitalpanik, 1969, she cut out the crotch of her jeans and walked the aisles of a Munich art-film house that featured sexually explicit films, challenging the voyeurs to look at a body that returned the gaze. She was already known for her action a year earlier, Tapp- und Tastkino (Tap and touch cinema), staged in the busy streets of Vienna’s shopping district. Wearing a large box over her torso,

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  print February 2000

  James Coleman

  This exquisite show is essentially a mini-retrospective of the Irish artist James Coleman’s work. Three of the nine pieces on display are from the early ’70s, when Coleman was still working primarily with silent 16 mm black-and-white film loops, among them the intriguing Playback of a Daydream, 1974, projected on a small screen on the stage of the museum’s film auditorium. The viewer encounters not a moving picture but a single static image: Joseph Jastrow’s famous duck-rabbit drawing, in which both animals can be seen, but not simultaneously. Each blinds the viewer to the other. The projected

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  print February 2000

  Gary Hume

  Gary Hume appears to have entered his Midsummer Night’s Dream period. His recent paintings conjure up a world of enchanted woods haunted by evanescent spirits, where nothing is quite what it seems. His principal subjects are things that fly, hover, hang, float, swim—birds, flowers, angels, nests, reflections in running water. Here, the laws of gravity and identity are in abeyance.

  Hume is by no means the first British artist to be interested in this kind of subject matter. When I interviewed him in 1995, just about the only bit of biographical information he gave me was that he takes his son to

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  print December 1999

  Silvia Kolbowski

  Silvia Kolbowski’s multimedia installation, An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art, 1998–99, comprises a 9-by-12-foot projection of a soundless, sixty-minute videotape loop featuring close-ups of different pairs of hands along with an audio recording of various voices. The hands and memories belong to twenty-two artists who responded to Kolbowski’s request to “briefly describe a conceptual art work, not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witnessed/experienced at the time.” Kolbowski encouraged the participants to assume a broad definition of Conceptualism, one

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  print September 1999

  Mary Kelly

  Mary Kelly’s Mea Culpa, 1999, gave the initial impression of being one long, thin gray banner extending entirely around the perimeter of the vast front gallery. In fact, like a film strip that breaks down into shorter segments, the work comprises four separate panels, one for each wall of the exhibition space. Each part is further divided into four sections and displays, against a white matte background, sixteen to twenty swags of light gray material. Uniformly shaped but tonally variegated, the draped material seems soft and ephemeral, like clouds seen through the window of an airplane. The

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  print May 1999

  Dennis Adams

  Over the past two decades, Dennis Adams has produced site-specific work, often in highly visible locations such as bus stops, that focuses on the phenomenon of collective amnesia in the late twentieth century. From the “transformations” of Patricia Hearst to the trial of Klaus Barbie, from the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy to the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Adams has singled out controversial figures and events from our not-too-distant past that, if buried underneath layers of silence, still carry an explosive charge.

  For his 1998 video installation, Outtake (first shown in Bremen,

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  print February 1999

  John Knight

  Since the late ’60s, John Knight has been producing a thoroughgoing, institutionally critical art, and in this show he continues his caustic, often brilliant interrogative practice with an installation that was as intellectually rigorous as it was seductive. Entering the gallery, one was immediately engulfed by the visual and olfactory extravaganza of twenty-seven floral arrangements that seemed momentarily to transform the exhibition space into a flower shop or a funeral parlor. Each bouquet was accompanied by a small card acknowledging the name of the lending institution, in each case a