print February 2013

Kerry James Marshall

THE MONOCHROMEis by definition dedicated to one hue. And so it is the modernist format most allied with purity, negation, substance—everything that is not external to the picture, everything that is not decoration or history or politics. But with this exhibition at the Secession, Kerry James Marshall used the monochrome to examine the question of color in all senses of the word, from its role in the history of modernist painting to its historical and even iconographic relation to past and present African American visual culture.

Marshall structured his presentation, which included sixteen

print December 2002

Dak’Art 2002

The exhibitions and publications of African curators and critics like Olu Oguibe, Okwui Enwezor, or Salah Hassan, to name just a few, have shown the cliché image of “authentic African art” to be an illusion and have countered it with more differentiated viewpoints. But the higher profile of African artists and increasing authority of African curators in the Western art world are changes that have taken place outside the continent. In the ten years of its existence, Dak’Art, the Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, in Dakar, has established itself as one place where a certain continuity in

print November 2000

Florian Pumhösl

Florian Pumhösl’s relationship to modernity has nothing to do with the widespread artistic historicism that playfully borrows modernist forms and ideas and uses them, “purified” of utopian and universalistic pretensions, for ironic or just entertaining purposes. Pumhösl’s work (much like that of Stan Douglas or Christopher Williams) is characterized by a historical perspective on modernity that is interested in its breaks, contradictions, and transformations. Part of this historically conscious praxis includes reconstructing exemplary modernist designs, and Pumhösl may be the artist who executes

print Summer 2000

Dorit Margreiter

To write for a primarily American readership about an exhibition by a European artist concerned with the commonplaces of American television presents a certain difficulty. Despite their worldwide dissemination through the media, the depicted cultures of high school, cheerleaders, or the Super Bowl, for example, are nonetheless very particular and cannot be quoted with the same self-assurance as they can within their own culture. On the other hand, our European understanding of American life is shaped in great part precisely by its clichéd reflection in the media.

In Dorit Margreiter’s video Short

print February 2000

Norbert Brunner/Michael Schuster

Conceptual photographer Michael Schuster and poet Norbert Brunner executed the project Dokumentarische Dialektstudie (Documentary dialect study) in 1979. In 1999, adhering to exactly the same specifications, the project was played through one more time. Before examining the character of such a repeat performance, let’s consider the original concept. As the complete title of the first version indicates, the “Documentary Dialect Study from the Fersental to Garmisch-Partenkirchen” follows the transmutation of the Tirolean dialect from the German-speaking southern Tirol in Italy across the Austrian

print October 1999

Martha Rosler

“Positions in the Life World,” a traveling survey of Martha Rosler’s work of the past thirty-four years, organized with the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, brings out one of the artist’s greatest strengths: her ability to articulate a broad spectrum of themes—and to rework them over the years with undiminished returns—in media appropriate to her subject and reflective of the changing contemporary art world.

The fact that Rosler’s exhibition opened during the war in Kosovo gave an unwanted if affecting concreteness to one of her ongoing thematic concerns: namely, war and the way it is represented in

print September 1999

Rénee Green

Renée Green’s exhibition “Between and Including” was a convincing model of a retrospective, even though in some ways it was fragmentary and included only work from the past four years. What made this version of a “retrospective” so compelling was its overlapping of a whole series of backward glances. To begin with there were the works, a selection of videos and installations placed in one large room that the artist had reconfigured as a labyrinth. Then there was an examination of Green’s personal history, the question of her origin and formation as subject and artist. On top of all this was a

previews September 1999

Steirlscher Herbst 99

This year, Graz’s autumn festival, Steirischer Herbst, includes a retrospective of William Kentridge’s work in the Neue Galerie and an exhibition in the Graz Künstlerhaus called “Telling Tales,” a show of Australian art. The Kunsthalle Feldbach is presenting a collaboration between Soo-Ja Kim and Jeanette Christensen, while Peter Weibel’s Net-art exhibition, “Net_Condition,” appears simultaneously in Graz, Karlsruhe (at the Zentrum für Kunst und Mediatechnologie, which Weibel directs), Tokyo, and Barcelona. “Re-Make/Re-Model,” an interdisciplinary project (undertaken by “work groups” in London,

print May 1999

Carola Dertnig

The last beats of the techno wave are finally fading out, and after watching countless videos of dancing artists in recent years, I wasn’t altogether eager to see Carola Dertnig’s recent exhibition, which was titled “Dancing with Remotes.” But it is only at first glance that the videos of this Austrian artist who lives in New York bear any relation to techno’s oft-celebrated theme: the withdrawal from the social into the private sensation of one’s own body merging with musical rhythms. What distinguishes Dertnig’s work from such privatisms are her subtly deployed references to social conditioning—an

print February 1999

Cora Pongracz

This exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Galerie Fotohof in Salzburg, offered the chance to rediscover Cora Pongracz, an artist who, despite her important role in Viennese art circles in the ’70s, had largely vanished from public view in the last few years. Among Pongracz’s most well-known works is a series of photographs in which she portrays the ’70s “art scene”—perhaps the reason her reputation as an artist has been reduced to that of a chronicler. Series like the “Photogeschichte Martha Jungwirth—Franz Ringel” (Photographic history Martha Jungwirth—Franz Ringel), 1972. (which

print December 1998

Octavian Trauttmansdorff

In this gallery, like many others, there are discrete spaces for exhibitions and offices. In his recent show, Octavian Trauttmansdorff inverted the function of the two areas: The gallerists worked in the exhibition space, directly in front of a picture window, while the artist installed photographs and a video in the traditional working space. This process of making the gallery’s working conditions and business visible is, of course, reminiscent of Michael Asher’s T975 gesture concerning the material “support system” of the apparently neutral aesthetic experience.

The walls around the new desk

print Summer 1998

Maria Eichhorn

Maria Eichhorn’s installation “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement” von Seth Siegelaub and Bob Projansky, 1997, addressed the famous “artist’s contract” of the early ’70s through which Seth Siegelaub (with the aid of lawyer Bob Projansky) tried to regulate artists’ rights. Siegelaub’s 1971 contract—although it has its roots in the Conceptual art movement—is based on a traditional conception of the artwork, and on a system comprising producers, dealers, and collectors. Siegelaub wanted to assure the artist of 15 percent of profits from the resale of artworks to a

Christian Kravagna