ANDREA FRASER

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  print December 2009

  THEIR FAVORITE EXHIBITIONS OF THE YEAR

  To take stock of the past year, Artforum contacted an international group of artists to find out which exhibitions and events were, in their eyes, the very best of 2009.

  RICHARD ALDRICH

  “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) You kind of get the feeling that Bonnard was a real artist. He was concerned not with the past (art history), present (his contemporaries), or future (his legacy), but with expressing himself in terms of his own perceptions, interactions, and experiences of the world. Whether of a room, a still life, or a loved one, each painting becomes

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  print Summer 2008

  PROCEDURAL MATTERS: THE ART OF MICHAEL ASHER

  I PURCHASED MICHAEL ASHER’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 profound influence on my development as an artist. Ten years later, I included my copy in Services, a project I organized with Helmut Draxler in Germany examining the social and economic conditions of post-studio art. It was stolen from the show. If whoever took the book is reading this now, I beg you to return it to me. It is something I treasured, and

• previews January 2008

  Michael Asher

  Michael Asher's upcoming installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which will involve reinstalling every temporary wall ever built in the museum's current building, promises to be another triumph of the method of site-specific intervention he pioneered.

  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 taught us much about the conditions and contexts of art. His upcoming installation at the Santa Monica Museum of art, which will involve reinstalling every temporary wall ever built in the museum's current building, promises to be another triumph of the method of site-specific intervention he pioneered. What has made Asher one of the most important and influential artists of the past thirty-five years

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  print September 2005

  FROM THE CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS TO AN INSTITUTION OF CRITIQUE

  NEARLY FORTY YEARS AFTER THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE, the practices now associated with “institutional critique” have for many come to seem, well, institutionalized. Last spring alone, Daniel Buren returned with a major installation to the Guggenheim Museum (which famously censored both his and Hans Haacke’s work in 1971); Buren and Olafur Eliasson discussed the problem of “the institution” in these pages; and the LA County Museum of Art hosted a conference called “Institutional Critique and After.” More symposia planned for the Getty and the College Art Association’s annual conference, along with

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  print December 2004

  the best books of the year

  WHAT BOOKS STOOD OUT IN THE PAST TWELVE MONTHS? ARTFORUM ASKED A HANDFUL OF HISTORIANS, CRITICS, AND ARTISTS TO NAME THE TITLE (AND, IN SOME CASES, TITLES) THEY MOST REMEMBERED FROM THE PREVIOUS YEAR.

  Arthur C. Danto

  The title of Joseph Leo Koerner’s extraordinary study The Reformation of the Image (University of Chicago Press) refers to the way Martin Luther “reformed” religious pictures to make them consistent with the Second Commandment, thus protecting them against the wave of iconoclasm that swept Protestant churches in the early sixteenth century. Luther’s remedy consisted in treating images

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  print October 2003

  FEMINISM & ART: NINE VIEWS

  HOW MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM’S INITIAL IMPACTS ON ART, ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS CONTINUING INFLUENCE? ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONES, DAN CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE DE ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO CONSIDER THIS QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR RESPONSES—REFINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES—SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE FOUND EXPRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY ART ARE AMBIVALENT (“IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THAT TERM,” AS PHELAN PUTS IT), MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.

  LINDA NOCHLIN

  As a participant in the women’s art movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, I have decidedly mixed feelings about the historicization of feminism. It is difficult to see lived experience transformed into historical text. Things that seemed open and dynamic are now pinned down and displayed like butterflies in a case. Of course, there is also the tendency to idealize the past, to see the women’s art movement as totally united. This was not the case: Although all of us were for justice, equity, and a fair shake for women artists, critics, and academics, our views were extremely

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  passages Summer 2003

  Colin de Land

  IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT, and I was standing, freezing, outside American Fine Arts, Co., when a shiny new purple pickup truck arrived with its ferocious cargo: The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Naked save for a coat of brightly colored body paint, seven band members leaped from the vehicle and paraded into the packed gallery for their performance. Inside the space, visitors were greeted by a photo in which bandleader Kembra Pfahler was seen prancing on a bed with another naked body—that of Colin de Land, the proprietor of American Fine Arts, painted completely blue and topped with a

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  print February 2003

  THE HAPPY END OF KIPPENBERGER’S AMERIKA

  MARTIN KIPPENBERGER SPAWNED A WEALTH OF ART-WORLD legends in his truncated career. His practice seemed specifically designed to maintain a steady buildup of anecdotes, many of which continue to circulate today, six years after his death. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Kippenberger’s birth, this month sees the opening of a major retrospective of his entire career at the Museum für Neue Kunst ZKM in Karlsruhe, with additional stops in Vienna and Eindhoven. Though his influence in Europe will be debated and discussed for a long time to come, there is no question that he is one of

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  print February 2003

  Andrea Fraser

  I was probably introduced to Martin at my first one-woman gallery show, which was at Galerie Christian Nagel in Cologne in 1990. He bought a copy of one of my museum-tour videos and a group of aluminum smiley and frowny faces I made to be installed next to other artworks. One of the interesting things about Kippenberger is how supportive he was of women artists, even though he performed, in a perfectly excessive way, the role of the macho German painter. Such support really challenged that ’80s opposition between painting, particularly German painting, and the postmodernist, neo-Conceptualist