Christian Marclay

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  passages March 17, 2013

  Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris (1947–2013)

  LAST MONTH my friend Butch lost his battle with cancer. Lawrence “Butch” Morris was a visionary musical thinker and practitioner who invented a new way to create live music through a vocabulary of gestures and signs. Situated between live composition and free improvisation, he described his method as “an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor.” He named it “conduction” and even trademarked the term. For him, Conduction® was a way to be creative and spontaneous with large groups of musicians. Since 1985, Butch directed over 140 conductions, collaborating with over five-thousand musicians in

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  print December 2011

  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 2011.

  ERICKA BECKMAN

  Mary Reid Kelley, Sadie the Saddest Sadist (Armory Show, New York) Tucked away in the back of the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects booth at the 2011 Armory Show was a monitor showing a costumed figure with exaggerated face paint, pacing in front of a hand-drawn black-and-white background. The piece was Mary Reid Kelley’s Sadie the Saddest Sadist, 2009, and the mixed metaphors, narrative snippets, and repurposed

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  print December 2003

  Christian Marclay

  CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

  1. Okkyung Lee and Martin Schütz (Tonic, New York, Mar. 23) An excellent improvisation, as two adventurous cellists in their first performance together dueled with swift bows in a cloud of rosin.

  2. Butch Morris and Burnt Sugar, The Rites Conductions Inspired by Stravinsky’s Le Sacre Du Printemps (Trugroid/Avantgroid) Greg Tate’s band under Morris’s baton. Seeing the maestro in a live “conduction” is like being in his brain—his thought process at once visible and audible.

  3. Ryoji Ikeda, op. (Touch) Electronic minimalist Ikeda unplugs and composes for a string quartet. A sparse

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  print December 1999

  BEST OF THE ’90s: MUSIC

  
  CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, artist:
  Driving across Europe with only one cassette, I never tired of MC Solaar’s Paradisiaque, a dazzling cross-cultural mix between American rap and chanson française—skillful wordplay in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp and Serge Gainsbourg.
  
  BEN RATLIFF, music critic, New York Times:
  I’ve been amazed by Caetano Veloso’s records––he is the avatar of a universal artist in pop music: a musician who studies and protects the cultural traditions of the New World, then generously expands them.

  ELIZABETH PEYTON, artist: Nirvana.

  BARBARA KRUGER, artist: There is no best of—just a