CAROL BOVE

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  print December 2016

  the best of 2016

  TO TAKE STOCK OF THE PAST YEAR, ARTFORUM ASKED AN INTERNATIONAL GROUP OF ARTISTS TO SELECT A SINGLE IMAGE, EXHIBITION, OR EVENT THAT MOST MEMORABLY CAPTURED THEIR EYE IN 2016.

  ALEX HUBBARD

  Rodin’s The Thinker, 1880–81, after a bomb planted by the Weather Underground exploded on March 24, 1970, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Photo: C. D. Moore.

  ANNE COLLIER

  Portrait of Hilton Als by Catherine Opie, wrapped in bubble plastic, as it appeared in “James Baldwin/Jim Brown and the Children,” curated by Als for the Artist’s Institute, New York, June 14.

  SLAVS AND TATARS

  A disposable, self-administering

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  print September 2014

  Carol Bove

  THE FIRST TIME I encountered Jeff Koons was through the hype. I was a teenager living in Oakland or Berkeley, going to the California College of Arts and Crafts, and my friends were talking about how this artist had hired a PR consultant and was mounting a big ad campaign to promote himself. I didn’t know what to think of the ads; they were both genuinely seductive and a little scary. They were not as heavy-handed as the other things I might have grouped them with stylistically (i.e., imagery perversely recuperating clean-cut 1950s styles, like that of Church of the SubGenius or Twin Peaks),

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  print November 2013

  Carol Bove

  “DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.” I just figured out what British occultist Aleister Crowley meant by that: It’s a twentieth-century, Western definition of dharma. Crowley doesn’t mean “Do whatever you want”—he’s telling you to discover what he termed true will, a kind of purpose that transcends the ego and brings the individual into harmony with nature and the universe.

  The discovery about Crowley and dharma eventually led me to wonder, What is the true will of an I beam? I found important clues in Guido Beltramini and Italo Zannier’s 2007 book Carlo Scarpa: Architecture