print January 1988

TODAY CROSSED OUT, A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM

HANNE DARBOVEN'S CONSTUCT OF TIME is about the transience of life, the inevitable passage of time. Even the most ingenious ideas become obscure with the years unless they are saved from oblivion and repositioned in a contemporary context. The present determines whether the past is still alive, and perspectives on the past have shifted according to the needs of the times. Today our present feels as endangered as the past. We become further disoriented in our spatiotemporal relationships as countless historical fragments float randomly out of context, burying us deeper in amnesia and heightening

print Summer 1986

Entrance, Entrapment, Exit: The Process of Bruce Nauman

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.

BRUCE NAUMAN IS NOT INTERESTED in “adding to a collection of things that are art,” as he puts it, but in “investigating the possibilities of what art may be.”¹ Where his inquiry will lead next is impossible to predict, since he goes about it in a meandering way, and, like Samuel Beckett’s character Molloy, will always be “back in the saddle again.” The route he takes may not be the “right” one, but for him the “wrong” road can be just as much of a discovery.

Nauman’s education is a case in point. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941, he

print May 1985

GERHARD RICHTER: PAINTING AS A MORAL ACT

AMONG THE LOOSE COLLECTION of essays, notes, comments, and fragments that William Carlos Williams entitled The Embodiment of Knowledge one finds “The Beginnings of an American Education (Chapter 2. The Address Toward Collegiate Study. The New in Art.),” in which the poet remarks about an art student’s “difficulty in knowing.”¹ Whatever the student has learned about what has been done in the past will, according to Williams, amount only to “that which is . . . of no use to him, in fact nothing less than a barrier which he must surmount if ever he is to do anything that can be called serious work.”

print September 1984

WAITING FOR DR. COLTELLO: A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM

DURING THE WEEKEND OF FEBRUARY 25–26, 1984. Claes Oldenburg and I met with Frank Gehry in New York to talk about a combined architectural and theatrical project for Venice originally proposed by the critic Germano Celant in connection with his exhibition “Art & Theater 1900–1984,” planned but not realized for the 1984 Venice Biennale. The events are now planned for the spring of 1985.

The Venice project provided a focus for a dialogue on art and architecture that the three of us had begun the previous year. Oldenburg and I spent two weeks in Gehry’s office in Venice, California, where we sharpened

print September 1983

“RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER”

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.
—Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

FURNITURE/SCULPTURE
THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN art and life / The interrelation between physical presence and diagrammatic representation
In her article “ABC Art” in the October–November 1965 issue of Art in America, Barbara Rose illustrated Richard Artschwager’s work among that of the Minimalists. Certainly the following general characteristics of Minimalism could apply to

Coosje Van Bruggen