Eric Banks

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  print February 2023

  LOCAL COLOR

  IN WILLIAM EGGLESTON’S Untitled, ca. 1970–73, five mostly modest-size vehicles—demure by comparison to the bench-seat behemoths the photographer seemed constitutionally drawn to—line up in awkward parking jobs like a row of mustered volunteers who haven’t quite yet figured out how to hold themselves and their rifles in formation. The cars are mismatched in make and color, from the burgundy of the Plymouth at the front (which dominates nearly a quarter of the photo’s expanse) to the silvery blue of the strange model (is it an import decked out with fins?) near the rear. The parking is not orderly

• previews May 2016

  “Rester Vivant”

  A dead poet no longer writes, which is why it’s important to stay alive. This simple working hypothesis was set out in Michel Houellebecq’s early essay “Rester vivant” (Stay Alive, 1991), and in a career that has made him more than just a writer, this volcanic figure has flirted with the negation of the claim again and again. He’s disappeared in real life, been kidnapped on the screen, and rubbed himself out in the 2010 novel The Map and the Territory. But he has also often threatened to disappear into other guises—filmmaker, photographer,

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  books November 2013

  Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims

  Returning to Reims, by Didier Eribon. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents, 2013. 240 pages.

  TO READERS who followed America’s culture-war shoot-outs of the 1980s and ’90s, Didier Eribon will forever be linked to Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his biography of the former and book-length interview with the latter, Eribon brought a journalist’s clarity to works that were models of intelligence leavened with implicit critical admiration. In the decades since, he made the transition from journalist to academic, but he never ceased to act as a dynamic mediator of worlds. In a country

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  print September 2012

  Eric Banks on Lawrence Alloway’s “Network: The Art World Described as a System”

  IN SEPTEMBER 1972, in what would become a decennial ritual, Artforum published an issue marking a significant birthday for the magazine, in this case its tenth anniversary. The cover selected for the issue was a simple black-and-white photo taken in the Artforum office of a vacant desk. Behind the desk, a grid comprising ten years’ worth of the magazine’s covers hung on the wall. The desk, one surmises, belonged to founding editor Philip Leider, who had just stepped down. Whether intended or not, the empty desk signified that the editorial direction of Artforum, mapped out visually in the grid

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  previews September 2011

  “September 11”

  In 2003, the late New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp received a FedEx package from Ellsworth Kelly containing a belated proposal for Ground Zero: a green trapezoid collaged on an aerial shot of the site.

  In 2003, the late New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp received a FedEx package from Ellsworth Kelly containing a belated proposal for Ground Zero: a green trapezoid collaged on an aerial shot of the site. “Like Piet Mondrian in the 1940s,” Muschamp wrote, Kelly had “transformed Manhattan into the musical state of mind we intuitively know it to be.” But the emotional pitch of that music, he noted, was perhaps “too high for the city to bear.” Ten years removed from the horror of the attacks, “September 11” presumes an audience prepared to look on almost forty artists’

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  books December 2007

  THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

  13 SCHOLARS, CRITICS, WRITERS, AND ARTISTS CHOOSE THE YEAR’S OUTSTANDING TITLES.

  BRIGID DOHERTY

  I turned to Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I (edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg; Stanford University Press) in connection with my attempts to look differently at what is made of thinking (and writing) in the art of Hanne Darboven, whose work has often been regarded (to my mind erroneously, or mostly erroneously) as an instance of “Conceptual art.” Psyche—which comprises translations of the first sixteen essays from a volume of Jacques Derrida’s writing that originally appeared

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  previews September 2006

  General Idea

  This show, which incorporates a touring exhibition of General Idea editions, focuses on the group’s media work, from FILE Megazine to AIDS wallpaper, and reunites pieces from the late “Mondo Cane” and “Placebo” series of sculptures.

  The three artists who made up General Idea—Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson—collaborated for twenty-five years after coming together in 1969 in Toronto. With Partz’s and Zontal’s deaths from AIDS in 1994, GI ceased to exist, but the past half decade has seen a surge of interest in the group’s early queer promotion of media art—an unholy pairing of Pop and mail art imbued with dark visions of s/m and fascism. This show, which incorporates a touring exhibition of GI editions, focuses on the group’s media work, from FILE Megazine to AIDS wallpaper, and reunites pieces

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  previews January 2006

  William Wegman

  Through more than 260 photographs, drawings, paintings, collages, books, and videos from 1968 to today, this show, organized by the Addison Gallery, may s how which critical take fits Wegman's oeuvre.

  Since 1970, William Wegman has marketed himself and his kennel of canine celebrities so well (and so far outside the precincts of contemporary art) that it's hard to formulate a critical take. But here are three attempts: (1) Wegman is a canny critical artist, the most literal (mis)reader of Smithson's site/non-site dialectic yet; (2) he's learned Warhol's “business art” model all too well; (3) he'd be nowhere without the adorable pooches, the most famous in America since Benji. Through more than 260 photographs, drawings, paintings, collages, books, and videos from

• previews January 2006

  Zero

  This exhibition promises something more than the usual retread of Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker. Instead, “Zero” looks at their influences (with some three hundred works by nearly fifty artists, from members of Gutaï to Pol Bury, Hans Haacke, Daniel Spoerri, and, of course, Yves Klein) and organizes the works largely according to theme (light, vibration, etc.).

  Time again to revisit Group Zero? The concerns of this midcentury minimovement, which caught the current of early ’60s European investigations into “environments” and kineticism, seem to come under scrutiny every few years, but this exhibition promises something more than the usual retread of Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker. Instead, “Zero” looks at their influences (with some three hundred works by nearly fifty artists, from members of Gutaï to Pol Bury, Hans Haacke, Daniel Spoerri, and, of course,

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  print December 2005

  the best books of the year

  Twelve scholars, critics, and artists choose the year's outstanding titles.

  YVE-ALAIN BOIS

  A book like Alastair Wright’s Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton University Press) is enough to rekindle my faith in the future of art history as a discipline. (Here I could also mention two other such rare pearls from 2005: Maria Gough’s The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution [University of California Press] and Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism [MIT Press]). The first amazing trait of Wright’s book is that it manages

• previews September 2005

  Albert Oehlen

  I Know What You Did Last Summer helped launch the careers of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. “I Know Whom You Showed Last Summer” (the title of Oehlen’s exhibition) won’t launch anyone’s career, but it may lead Miami gallerygoers to take a closer look at two artists, Albert Oehlen and Malcolm Morley—or at least that’s Clearwater’s plan. Oehlen’s thirty-work survey, spanning 1983 to the present, strategically precedes Morley’s big MoCA show in December. The younger German painter is known for collaborating with more folks than a Vichy bureaucrat (having

• previews September 2005

  “Masters of American Comics”

  Also on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum

  Funny as a crutch, as Ralph Malph used to say: Most discussions of comics are drier than a Methodist wake. And with fans’ obsessive knowledge of particular faves often exaggerating their subject’s relative cultural importance, essays on the medium frequently adopt a tone that is, ironically, world-serious. This show hopes to circumvent this somber solipsism by tracing comics’ development over the century, with drawings and vintage newspaper strips by fifteen “masters” exhibited alongside comic books themselves. The