Dan Cameron

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  passages November 17, 2016

  Tony Feher (1956–2016)

  MY FIRST COLLABORATION WITH TONY FEHER took place in the summer of 1995, in a group exhibition titled “Thresholds/Limiares” at Fundação de Serralves in Porto, Portugal. The curatorial premise was for each artist—including Tony, Lewis deSoto, R. M. Fischer, Kristin Oppenheim, Paul Ramirez-Jonas, Diana Thater, Meyer Vaisman, and Millie Wilson—to present two works: one within the stately family house and the other in the surrounding gardens. When Tony explained to me that everything he needed for his indoor work would be in his checked luggage, that his total materials and production budget on-site

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  diary November 09, 2007

  Second Act

  New Orleans

  Two images, bookends really, stand out from Creative Time’s presentation of the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s (CTH) production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward last Saturday night. The first image was celebratory—at precisely 7:30 PM, Rebirth Brass Band kicked off a typically raucous secondline, and the steady flow of five hundred attendees through the front gates and into the bleachers marked the first occasion since Katrina that the crippled neighborhood has been a cultural focus for the rest of the city. The second image was considerably more somber. After taking their

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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 April 2003

  Group Material

  DAN CAMERON: In the late ’70s, wasn’t there a sense that object making as a form of art production had sort of run its course? Was there a new way of being involved in culture that was somehow summed up for you by the music scene?

  JULIE AULT: Well, I wouldn’t say object making had run its course. But the definitions of art and being an artist were in question in a very productive and stimulating way. I arrived in New York in 1976 from Maine, and as a teenager got to experience punk, and a bit later rap. The music scene downtown really transformed art culture, and the DIY atmosphere across a number

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  print March 2003

  Peter Halley

  DAN CAMERON: Before we talk about the ’80s, we should talk about talking about the ’80s.

  PETER HALLEY: It’s interesting, because the ’80s were really three different periods: 1980 to 1983 was dominated by the recession and by the emergence of new European painting and neo-expressionism. Then you had the mid-’80s, in which the robust economic recovery spurred the emergence of neo-Conceptualism—which included artists who were showing for the first time, Koons, myself, et cetera, but also marked the first widespread acceptance of artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, who were first shown

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  print March 2003

  Ross Bleckner

  ROSS BLECKNER: You’ve got your work cut out for you. I’m sure it’s going to be very difficult to extract the kind of memory trace you’re after from all of these artists because everybody will have the same thing to say. They’ll all rail on about decade-ism. They’ll naturally protest the idea that any artist—least of all an artist as interesting as themselves!—could be categorized in such a fake historical way, considering of course that all of these artists are still actually alive and hopefully still productive.

  DC: And doing the best work of their careers!

  RB: Naturally. [Laughter.]

  DC: When I

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  print March 2003

  1981: Keith Haring’s Wild Style

  ONE AFTERNOON in late spring of 1981, I was taking a lunch break from my new job as exhibition coordinator for the now defunct Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. The IAUS, a think tank propelled into existence in 1967 by Peter Eisenman, was located on Fortieth Street just west of Fifth Avenue. Part of the IAUS mission—along with publishing October, Skyline, and Oppositions and hosting frequent panel discussions—was to mount exhibitions of architects and projects deemed sympathetic to the founder’s ideals and methodologies. I was recruited to oversee the logistics of these shows, whose

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  print December 2000

  Manifesta 3

  Although Manifesta has been loosely dedicated since its inception four years ago to defining a “new Europe,” the 2000 installment provided the first opportunity for the show to inhabit a city that might actually exemplify such a definition. The only nomadic species in the proliferating genus of biennial exhibitions, Manifesta’s previous editions in Rotterdam and Luxembourg were, respectively, safe and sloppy, and both were of a piece with the stylistic drift in European art toward narrative, self-involved work (e.g., Pipilotti Rist) that largely circumvents issues of politics and identity. In

• previews September 2000

  Öyvind Fahlström

  One of the most memorable pieces in the 1997 Documenta X was Öyvind Fahlström's The Little General (Pinball Machine), 1967. Resembling a raised indoor swimming pool with some two dozen movable parts spread out across its shimmering Plexiglas surface, the thirty-year-old “variable” sculpture radiated a visual audacity that made much of the current work around it pale by comparison. Ersatz scoring cues brushed up against cutouts of historical and pop-culture figures, who in turn seemed to jostle dismembered cartoon limbs and partial anatomies. The cumulative effect was dizzying, as if news,

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  print December 1999

  Dan Cameron

  1. “Places with a Past” (Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston, SC, 1991) The premise behind curator Mary Jane Jacob’s project—without question the most well-executed site-specific exhibition ever organized on American soil—was that the ghosts of southern history would emerge through the eighteen contributions by twenty-three artists. Much of the work included, such as David Hammons’s House of the Future and Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler’s Camouflaged History, took on the authority of public commissions. Other memorable projects included Ann Hamilton’s investigation of the power of indigo, Christian

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  print November 1999

  “Looking for a Place”

  Visitors to Santa Fe who like to take their high culture with a heaping spoonful of counterculture probably came away from the Third International SITE Santa Fe Biennial with a lot to ponder. Organized by Rosa Martínez under the dreamy rubric “Looking for a Place,” the exhibition projected a consistent, provocatively idealistic tone that proved infectious to the participating artists and most local viewers. Still, it was not as immediately user-friendly as the previous editions, and the confrontations it provoked were not meant to be brushed off lightly. In this sense, the biennial was closer

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  print October 1999

  Collins & Milazzo

  Before Collins & Milazzo, “independent curator” was a sleepy designation for moonlighting art critics and academics. After the pair’s roaring descent on the scene circa 1984, it became a full-blown job description. A visit to a show organized by the twosome was an instant entrée to a world in which cool Conceptualism, an overheated market, and French theory in overdrive shared the same bed; for artists, being tapped by the curatorial duo meant that suddenly one’s work was part of the discourse. It was a heady time, made even more so by the deliberate ambiguity fostered by the curators themselves