Anne Ellegood

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  previews May 2012

  “Jimmie Durham: A Matter of Life and Death and Singing”

  With the patience of a philosopher and the humor of a prankster, Jimmie Durham has for more than four decades been challenging our understanding of how history and ideology shape identity and representation.

  With the patience of a philosopher and the humor of a prankster, Jimmie Durham has for more than four decades been challenging our understanding of how history and ideology shape identity and representation. His practice—initially part of the lively downtown New York art scene in the early 1980s, with subsequent years based in Mexico, Berlin, and Rome—moves effortlessly between prose, poetry, performance, and visual art to tackle questions of individual freedom from a position of intractable yet witty resistance. This summer, the M HKA will

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  previews September 2011

  “Mark Handforth: Rolling Stop”

  In 1996, MoCA, North Miami launched a program meant to raise the profile of emerging local artists. The first installment was a solo project by Mark Handforth. Since then, Handforth’s work has garnered international recognition, yet he has chosen to remain in Miami, participating in the city’s increasingly dynamic contemporary art scene. This fall, the museum will host its second exhibition of the artist’s work, promising a presentation appropriately larger in scope and ambition, including forty sculptures made since the mid-1990s. Viewers will be afforded the

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  print December 2009

  Anne Ellegood

  ANNE ELLEGOOD

  1 “Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World” (Drawing Center, New York) This large gathering of Morton’s drawings (curated by João Ribas) is a revelation. In her short career, the artist gracefully moved from abstract repeated systems, through mapping her children’s games, to joyful combinations of botanical drawings and wordplay from the mid-1970s, just before her untimely death. But in the intimate space of the Drawing Center, the real stars were works that hovered between two dimensions and three: the relatively obscure Wood Drawings from 1971, small constructions that

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  interviews January 2009

  1000 WORDS: JIMMIE DURHAM

  Are those real poems or did you write them yourself?
  
  —Overheard by Jimmie Durham

  JIMMIE DURHAM DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE’S DOING, but this is a good thing. In a practice spanning four decades and encompassing performance, sculpture, drawings, video, and writing, he has continuously resisted the idea that art should put forward an intricate concept or express a system of belief. He has argued that art is an intellectual endeavor that should activate and participate in a dialogue rather than take a position. He doesn’t want to make real art—as in, learned, authenticated, autonomous art—he wants to make

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  print March 2008

  the 6th Mercosul Bienal

  IN THE WAKE OF this past summer’s Grand Tour, and the debates surrounding the Venice Biennale and Documenta 12 in particular, some of us were left wondering what, if anything, could restore confidence in the idea that biennials remain a relevant and vital form of exhibition-making. One possible answer: the Sixth Mercosul Bienal in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Organized by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (soon to leave his post as curator of Latin American art at the Blanton Museum of Art, in Austin, Texas, to become director of the New York– and Caracas-based Coleción Patricia Phelps de Cisneros), the Mercosul

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  print January 2007

  Sara VanDerBeek

  IN ON PHOTOGRAPHY, Susan Sontag claimed that all photographs are memento mori, tinged with an intrinsic pathos that encourages an awareness of our mortality. In the context of our historical moment—mournful and uneasy after September 11, overwhelmed in the face of violence and human suffering in Iraq and Darfur—this property of photographic reproduction seems particularly appropriate for an artist to engage. Certainly, the intimately scaled photographs of handmade assemblages that comprised Sara VanDerBeek’s first solo show, “Mirror in the Sky” (last year at D’Amelio Terras in New York), are