print September 2018

Hell Is For Children

“A THOUSAND SHAPES of death surround us, and no man can escape them, or be safe.” Sarpedon makes this remark to Glaucus in The Iliad, Book 12. Bill Paxton’s character in Aliens puts the same thing a different way: “Game over, man! We’re fucked!” For Paxton’s character, Private Hudson, death has no shape at all—it’s just a smudge on his screen, a blur of malevolent radiation. But that’s more than sufficient to establish the salient fact, which he relays to his comrades with a memorable intonation of rising panic.

In November 2016, we didn’t know the exact contours of the nightmare that was about

news May 2012

talks with curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev about Documenta 13

ELIZABETH SCHAMBELAN: As artistic director of Documenta 13 this summer, you’ve chosen not to organize the exhibition around a single theme or concept. Instead, the materials circulated so far articulate a constellation of figures, ideas, and concerns, some of which are in tension with others: for example, secrets, riddles, and paradoxes on the one hand, hard science on the other. Yet interdisciplinarity emerges as one implicit animating principle—of course, contemporary art is inherently interdisciplinary, and curatorial practice reflects that, too, but in the case of Documenta 13 this

print January 2012

“Postmodernism”

DOES POSTMODERNISM BEGIN with the teapot? The question is prompted by the V&A’s design survey “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–1990,” where the vessels appear with bewildering frequency. On view are Adrian Saxe’s Ampersand teapot (1988), Richard Notkin’s Double Cooling Towers teapot (1984), Matteo Thun’s Pontifex teapot (1983), and so on, ad infinitum. The best of the bunch is Marco Zanini’s weirdly brilliant Colorado teapot (1983), a truly original example of the form that simultaneously evokes a pacifier, a pop-up chicken thermometer, and the red-nippled breast of a Tom Wesselmann

print December 2011

Carrie Moyer

After receiving her BFA in painting from the Pratt Institute in 1985, Carrie Moyer became somewhat disenchanted with her chosen medium. She supported herself as a graphic designer, and her art practice, in turn, became increasingly design-oriented: She put her talents to use creating agitprop for such groups as act up, Queer Nation, and Dyke Action Machine! (which she cofounded with Sue Schaffner in 1991). All the while, she studied the historical nexuses of art, politics, and design, from Constructivism to the visual production of the ’60s counterculture. Only in the early 1990s did she begin

print October 2011

CLOSE-UP:

FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS in the late 1970s, John Divola made a habit of visiting an abandoned house on Malibu’s Zuma Beach, toting a Pentax camera and a few cans of spray paint. On his arrival, he’d inspect the premises, seeing what had changed since the last time he’d been there, what ad hoc redecorations had occurred at the hands of vagrants or the wind. If nothing looked especially interesting, he’d move things around, do some spray-painting, and then begin taking pictures.

In the resulting series of some fifty color photographs, the house seems afflicted with the kind of slip-sliding kineticism

previews September 2011

“Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990”

As exemplified by the Memphis group’s antic asymmetries or the high-low architectural fugues of Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, and even Philip Johnson (who killed his own master narrative with New York’s ersatz-Georgian AT&T building), postmodern style once enjoyed a reputation as the most bemusing interlude in recent design history.

As exemplified by the Memphis group’s antic asymmetries or the high-low architectural fugues of Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, and even Philip Johnson (who killed his own master narrative with New York’s ersatz-Georgian AT&T building), postmodern style once enjoyed a reputation as the most bemusing interlude in recent design history. But a renewed appreciation of all things po-mo has been building lately, and this show—encompassing some 250 exhibits, from Ettore Sottsass’s iconic Casablanca sideboard to Grace Jones’s Constructivist maternity dress, with

diary November 17, 2010

National Libation Front

AT A TUESDAY LUNCHEON following the preview of Kutlug Ataman’s midcareer retrospective at Istanbul Modern, a British newspaper critic asked the artist: “Are people constantly telling you that you look like Robert Downey Jr.?” Perhaps relieved to discuss something other than the exhibition—his first in his native Turkey, and the subject of a lengthy press conference earlier that day—Ataman answered, “Constantly,” and said that during a visit to Los Angeles a pair of teenage girls had approached him for an autograph, which he’d obligingly provided. Indeed, not only Ataman’s physiognomy but also

print September 2010

Joe Bradley and Chris Martin

In Chris Martin’s painting Six Pillows Rose Up to Greet the Dawn—Good Morning! Good Morning!, 2007–2009, the six pillows—appended to a canvas in two rows of three—appear to have had a rough night indeed. But, per the title, they are nevertheless jaunty in their thick coatings of blue, white, pink, or yellow pigment, cheerfully registering all the depravities of facture that may occur when oil paint is slathered onto stuffed-cotton convexities. The paint is scabby and scrofulous in some places, rippled with mazelike whorls in others, while the sections that are smooth have a strangely plasticine

print April 2010

Kazuo Shiraga

Though Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008) has long been considered one of the most important members of Japan’s Gutaï group, this lucid exhibition was his first solo show in the United States. In consequence, many viewers may have been unaware, at least initially, of the salient fact that he painted with his feet. Laying his support (first flimsy paper, later canvas) on the floor, and holding on to a rope suspended from the ceiling of his studio, he would slip and slide through blobs of oil paint. The marks that resulted have a kind of beastly quality: deeply furrowed; seemingly random, sometimes spasmodic,

print December 2009

Peter Halley

With their stark, rectilinear compositions and their palette of unmodulated blacks and retina-searing fluorescents, the nine large paintings in “Peter Halley: Early Work, 1982 to 1987” still pack a visual wallop, their Day-Glo acrylics as deathless as Clorox bottles. In the mid-1980s, some relict formalist, stumbling upon them in the East Village, might have mistaken them for a New Wave homage to de Stijl. But Halley, steeped in critical theory, dubbed his squares and rectangles cells or prisons and his rigid lines conduits, and occasionally introduced some liminally representational element,

print January 2009

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: PROSPECT.1 NEW ORLEANS

International biennials of contemporary art have long ventured into the cities that serve as their hosts, but perhaps none has reckoned with so loaded a locale as PROSPECT.1 NEW ORLEANS. More than three years after Hurricane Katrina wrought its devastation, much of the city remains in grave disrepair, making it a setting where critical designations such as “site-specific work” and “socially committed practice” can seem tenuous at best. Curator Dan Cameron and the eighty-one international artists he invited to participate in the first New Orleans biennial were well aware of this dilemma, and they often addressed the challenge by directly involving local communities across the city. The nearly three hundred works on view through January 18 by no means obviate the complexities of staging an exhibition in such a deeply troubled place, but they necessarily suggest heightened and far-ranging questions about how a biennial—or any work of art—might truly engage its context. Artist GLENN LIGON and Artforum senior editor ELIZABETH SCHAMBELAN headed to the bayou to survey the results.

I ALMOST MISSED one of the most affecting presentations of Prospect.1 New Orleans. Wandering into a small room at the back of the L9 Center for the Arts, I discovered “Gone,” an exhibition of flood-damaged photographs assembled by the center’s founders, local artists Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick. Hung salon style in their ruined mats and mud-encrusted frames, these black-and-white documentary photos of weddings, block parties, and second-line parades in the Lower Ninth Ward are a devastating reminder of what Hurricane Katrina swept away and what a courageous and determined group of artists,

print Summer 2008

the Whitney Biennial

IN AMY GRANAT AND DREW HEITZLER’S 2007 double-screen film, T.S.O.Y.W., on view in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, a motorcyclist travels from Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, to the Mojave Desert. But the primary sense of movement is in the back-and-forth between the two projections: Sometimes the images on the screens are just slightly off-register, as if Granat and Heitzler were shooting standing next to each other; sometimes they’re completely divergent. The lateral dynamic cuts across and impedes the linear momentum of the journey, as does the intermittent

previews May 2008

Seth Price

This exhibition will feature at least as much new work as old and will likely blur the distinction between the two, as befits a practice so invested in dispersal, circulation, and recursion.

Crumpled sheets of clear polyester film screenprinted with stills from mujahideen videos pulled off the Internet; precision-cut pieces of wood and metal delineating the negative space around images of people kissing or lighting cigarettes; vacuum-formed polystyrene that registers the shape but jettisons the mass of objects like bomber jackets and ropes: Even at their most insistently material, Seth Price's works gesture toward some state of antimatter, invoking voids, transparency, and the weightless flux of the digital. This exhibition, organized by Beatrix Ruf, will

previews May 2008

Andrea Zittel, Monika Sosnowska 1:1

In this exhibition, roughly one hundred of Zittel's quasi-utilitarian objects, plus gouaches, drawings, and paintings on wood, occupy the Schaulager's first floor, while on the lower level, Sosnowska presents nine sculptures.

Andrea Zittel's multiplatform practice elaborates a high-design, postmillenarian vision of rugged individualism—which is to say, one that remains very much on the grid, engaging with, rather than retreating from, the encroachments of consumer culture. The grid with which the Warsaw-based Monika Sosnowska concerns herself, on the other hand, is the geometry of modern architecture: Her sculptures and installations skew verticals and horizontals and expose the latent irrationalities of even the most soberly institutional setting. In this exhibition, organized by Theodora

previews January 2008

Ulla von Brandenburg

Like some other artists for whom the world is a stage—to paraphrase the title of the Tate Modern group exhibition in which she recently appeared—Ulla von Brandenburg reanimates outmoded theatrical tropes (notably, the tableau vivant), along with nineteenth-century source materials drawn from that moment when the avant-garde seemed as enamored of the occult as of industrialism and science.

Like some other artists for whom the world is a stage—to paraphrase the title of the Tate Modern group exhibition in which she recently appeared—Ulla von Brandenburg reanimates outmoded theatrical tropes (notably, the tableau vivant), along with nineteenth-century source materials drawn from that moment when the avant-garde seemed as enamored of the occult as of industrialism and science. Her 16-mm films, watercolors, murals, and labyrinthine installations of moving-image projections on fabric panels—all of which will be represented in this exhibition of new and

books October 2007

The So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg

HENRI LEFEBVRE CALLED IT an “immense boutique,” the “Palm Beach of the poor,” and a “complete failure”; Gordon Matta-Clark dubbed it a “brave-new cobweb”; and Jean Baudrillard, in a single short paragraph, likened it to a “carcass,” an “incinerator,” a “black monolith,” and a “mad convection current.” Architectural history is full of snarky disparagements of newfangled buildings, but the wave of criticism that greeted the 1977 opening of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Centre Pompidou was remarkable not only for its intensity but also because so much of the opprobrium came from the intellectual

previews September 2007

Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs has proposed “the politics of rehearsal” as the organizing principle of his first major US museum exhibition, which brings together some half dozen video installations, as well as preparatory drawings and paintings from the past decade.

Francis Alÿs has proposed “the politics of rehearsal” as the organizing principle of his first major US museum exhibition, which brings together some half dozen video installations, as well as preparatory drawings and paintings from the past decade. If a rehearsal is an enactment of an event that has yet to occur, then its politics would seem to locate possibility in perpetual deferral. This is one way, in any case, to think about the artist’s wryly Sisyphean projects (most recently, he traced Israel’s contested Green Line with a leaky can of paint and connected Havana

previews September 2007

Kelley Walker

This exhibition, the artist’s first institutional solo show, consists of some thirty pieces, most of them new works created for the occasion.

Kelley Walker takes mass-media images (ads, magazine covers, mug shots of Michael Jackson) and subjects them to various manipulations—scanning, cropping, rotating, enlarging, abstracting, superimposing, sometimes using toothpaste or chocolate at various points along the way. The resulting artworks—whether screenprints, CD-ROMS, sculptures, or posters—behave more like waves than like particles, in that their materiality seems less at issue than the processes of their dissemination and the velocity at which they move across sites of reproduction. This exhibition, curated

previews May 2007

Paul Poiret

To understand the radicality of Paul Poiret’s designs, you have to compare his “look” to the starchy, buxom, Edwardian silhouette that preceded it. True, the “Pasha of Paris,” as he was known, released women from their corsets only to encrust them in a kind of Orientalist carapace. But he also implied that a woman’s allure lay not in the shape of her torso but in her gestures, attitude, and presence—a step in the right direction that blazed the trail for Chanel’s protofeminist modernism. Featuring fifty Poiret ensembles dating from 1903 to 1928, Art Deco

print May 2007

Andrea Fraser

There’s a storied moment in Andrea Fraser’s 2001 video Little Frank and His Carp: Touring the Guggenheim Bilbao, the artist, exhorted by her audio guide to admire the architecture, proceeds to share an erotic interlude with a wall. Fraser’s twelve-minute video A Visit to the Sistine Chapel, 2005, on view in her recent show at Friedrich Petzel, has a similar premise. It, too, follows the artist on an audio-guided tour, this time through the Vatican Museum. But its humor is less outré, as befits the setting. The laughs derive mainly from Fraser’s deadpan reactions to the inevitable rhetorical

Elizabeth Schambelan