Collier Schorr

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  print December 2007

  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 2007. Contributions by ten of those artists have been reproduced below. For the rest, see the December issue of Artforum.

  CATHERINE SULLIVAN

  Daniel Mendel-Black, “The Paintings Are Alive” (Mandarin Gallery, Los Angeles) The eleven paintings in this show seemed to create a place for the palette of Play-Doh to oppress acrylic and oil into some perilous graphic universe of cynical optimism. Looking is like falling in these paintings; your eyes are

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  print October 2004

  Collier Schorr

  JON VOIGHT IS WALKING ACROSS PARK AVENUE. “HEY JOE,” someone says, kind of low, like Jimi Hendrix, but shy, too—“Hey Joe Buck.” Jon Voight, who is Joe Buck, is slouching toward a voice. The voice, which is lyrical, has come from the streetlights and the flowerbeds and the island between the avenues, and Jon turns his head of bright hair back and forth before settling on which way to direct his sloping gait.

  In his new Berluti di Parigi boots, Joe Buck is, according to James Leo Herlihy, who chose them, “six foot one and life was different.” Of course, it goes without saying that the boots are a

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  print October 2003

  FEMINISM & ART: NINE VIEWS

  HOW MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM’S INITIAL IMPACTS ON ART, ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS CONTINUING INFLUENCE? ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONES, DAN CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE DE ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO CONSIDER THIS QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR RESPONSES—REFINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES—SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE FOUND EXPRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY ART ARE AMBIVALENT (“IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THAT TERM,” AS PHELAN PUTS IT), MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.

  LINDA NOCHLIN

  As a participant in the women’s art movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, I have decidedly mixed feelings about the historicization of feminism. It is difficult to see lived experience transformed into historical text. Things that seemed open and dynamic are now pinned down and displayed like butterflies in a case. Of course, there is also the tendency to idealize the past, to see the women’s art movement as totally united. This was not the case: Although all of us were for justice, equity, and a fair shake for women artists, critics, and academics, our views were extremely

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  print May 1996

  FLASH TRACK: TERRY RICHARDSON PHOTOGRAPHS JOHN BARTLETT

  FLIPPING THROUGH A RECENT pictorial by Terry Richardson in Details, this is what I saw: young men at odds with the poses their bodies struck. Not unhappy, not shy, just unsure. One model, pitched forward, tucks his hand into the waistband of his pants, mimicking a pose he saw in a magazine: it’s exciting to see someone looking like they’re about to fall out of the frame. From four pages of mod black and white that deflate Christopher Makos’ pumped-up youths, Richardson switches to color. Two guys, one with Andy Gibb hair, look like Dennis Cooper memories of Larry Clark teens. Prom night. A

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  print Summer 1995

  DIARY OF A SAD HOUSEWIFE

  TODD HAYNES’ SAFE BEGINS at night in a Mercedes floating past manicured shrubbery and self-important gates. The emblematic star on the hood is a rifle sight, scoping suburbia’s upscale terrain. There is no gun beneath the seat, no hand roaming restlessly under a skirt, just the noiresque suggestion of such a melodrama at the end of the road. Beautiful music like breathing backwards accompanies this allegorical drive which is soon interrupted by a sneeze. With this slip—the first in a series of escalating symptoms, disaffected housewife Carol White (Julianne Moore), reveals the true nature of

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  print February 1995

  CK1

  THERE THEY ARE, Zoe, Ione, Sofia, and Donovan. They’re not wearing their ski goggles but there they are, winding around all the little round tables of the Odeon, sweeping glances off the crotch-level heads of other notable but less recognizable patrons. They seem to bump into each other, their strides a jumble of soft hip-checks and eyes that slide around to their ears so they can watch themselves wind the concourse. But this is the wrong commercial.

  the wild One, the male One, the female One

  Only the Nancy Boy Donovan does CK1—Donovan, who’s with it in an ambisexual, ambidextrous, ambient, Jean

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  print October 1994

  Poster Girls

  BILLED AS THE FILM you want to see but never will, Straight to Hell looks like a composite of afternoon talk shows and action, made-for-TV, and B movies: quintessential sailors in dress whites, so clean you could eat off them, parade around, a slender collection of almost heroes. But in an expansion of the arena for heroics, vigilantism on a par with Charles Bronson and Sly Stallone replaces the restrained gays-in-the-military debate between mostly-gay-white military poster-boys and sympathetic TV hosts. “She came out. So the army kicked her out. Now she’s out for blood,” the slogan runs. The

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  print October 1994

  OPENINGS: INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE

  She threw a leg across him and he touched her face.
  Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. “Don’t,”
  she said, “fingerprints.”
  —William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984
  

  ABOUT EIGHT YEARS AG0 I lived for a while with Richard Prince’s Spiritual America, 1983. The photograph was outfitted with a brass masterpiece lamp, so that a sheet of light ran down the center of Brooke Shields’ glazed body; until the bulb blew, I used it as a night-light, so whenever I woke up I saw Brooke glistening in the tub, beckoning me with her huge painted face and baby’s body. The image, which had been the subject of

  
  
  

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  print February 1994

  UNTITLED: A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM

  The Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss are putterers who make things they needn’t make; items that are usually useful achieve futility in their hands. They are a miniguild, producing an art that goes undercover, that slips by, momentarily undetected in a scan of one’s surroundings. In the summer of 1992, for example, in Schorndorf, south Germany, they took over a prefabricated one-car garage behind an Imbiss Bude (snack shack) in an expanse of farmland. Through a small window one could spy the props of a nondescript existence—a worktable, modest cooking facilities, dog food, a comfortable

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  print December 1993

  TABBOO! THE ART OF STEPHEN TASHJIAN

  “Is this a bed or a cloud?” sighed John. “Percy, Percy—before you go, I want to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “For doubting you when you said you had a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.” Percy smiled.

  “I thought you didn’t believe me. It’s that mountain you know.”

  “What mountain?”

  “The mountain the château rests on. It’s not very big for a mountain. But except about fifty feet of sod and gravel on top it’s solid diamond. One diamond, one cubic mile without a flaw”

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, 1922

  We may no longer understand how to look at Stephen Tashjian’s paintings. We

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  print Summer 1993

  OPENINGS: CHERYL DONEGAN

  The pitcher fingers the brim of his cap, he brushes dust from his brow. His cleats grind into the mound, he plants himself solidly into that little hill. The batter, the one in red with a thick plastic cap on, shifts, a thousand times checking his grip. The runner also in red inches away from the canvas bag on first, a teasing dance full of bravado. The pitcher winds up his arm, the batter poises to swing, the man on first throws his body toward second. In an instant the batter pauses and the pitcher pivots. The runner is nailed at second. The execution of the perfect fake.

  Her slick, seallike

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  print February 1993

  LOCKDOWN: ROBERT GOBER AT DIA

  It is astonishing that turning criminals into sailors used to be regarded as a form of punishment.
  —Jean Genet, 1953
  

  THERE ARE THREE SPACES: a dark space, a bright space, and then a darker space. Two domains and a portal. The first is the Dia building itself: the elevator or the stairs leads to the third floor, where stacks of bundled newspapers spill across a wall, sit beneath a closed door. An almost empty series of corners and floor; a place of refuse waiting to be carted away.

  Then the bright space, the forest. Your body stands in a clearing. The sun could be pouring in—the heat is relentless,