Christopher Williams

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  passages January 2016

  Hilla Becher

  Technology is above requiring an interpretation; it interprets itself. You merely need to select the right objects and place them precisely in the picture; then they tell their story of their own accord.
  —Hilla Becher, 1989
  

  IN READING interviews and conversations with Bernd and Hilla Becher over the years, I’ve noted the sentiments of the above quote reformulated in various ways; in turn, the Bechers’ subjects “tell their own stories” to the camera, and their subjects and the camera “cooperate” with and “perform” for one another. In addition to this, and from the very beginning, the Bechers

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  passages Summer 2009

  Coosje van Bruggen

  “PREPARE YOURSELF TO SPEAK with Coosje van Bruggen,” the assistant on the other end of the line said. Little did I know what I was preparing myself for. The call came after I had first met Coosje at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in 1981. I had just finished my MFA at CalArts, where I studied with Michael Asher (who introduced us), John Baldessari, and Douglas Huebler, among others. I showed Coosje my work and she asked her husband, Claes Oldenburg, to join us; two days later, the phone rang. She informed me that they wanted to acquire the piece we had talked about. They were the first people

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  print December 2006

  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 were, in their eyes, the very best of 2006.

  AMY SILLMAN

  “Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul” (Museum of Modern Art, New York) In a rather cynical mode, I trudged uptown one day last spring to see the Munch show at MoMA for what I thought would be a cliché-ridden overview of Nordic gloom-goth. What I got instead was a hard punch to the gut: powerful color, radical ideas about the depiction of memory as space, paintings with emotional vanishing points rather than rational optical