print Summer 2014

DISREPUTABLE SOURCES: ART AND COMICS

OVER THE YEARS, Artforum has published reviews of all types—laudatory or excoriating, lyrical or polemical—but only one has taken the form of a comic. That singular piece, authored by Art Spiegelman, appeared in the December 1990 issue of the magazine. Spiegelman’s task was to assess the controversial exhibition “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture,” which had gone on view the preceding October at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and, while he was not nearly as incensed as some commentators by curators Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik’s mixture of MoMA masterpieces and pop-cultural

print April 2011

TO BE DETERMINED: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN ARMLEDER

John Armleder’s art never looks quite like itself. Drawing on what he calls a supermarket of forms, the artist, over the course of a forty-five-year career, has produced works that could pass for Suprematist paintings, Minimalist sculptures, high-design furnishings, and any number of other easily categorized objects—albeit wryly reoriented, physically or conceptually, as if to delay the moment of recognition. Indeed, sometimes his art isn’t itself, as in his sprawling exhibitions that liberally incorporate others’ works. Yet such tactics speak less to strategies of reference or appropriation than to Armleder’s conviction that agency—of both artist and audience—is activated precisely in this ever more subtle process of self-differentiation. In the gap between the thing as such and the thing as type, between the specific and the general, Armleder’s work finds room to move, instigating the singular mode of participation that he has been developing since his early engagements with Fluxus. Here, critic and curator Fabrice Stroun talks to the artist about a practice that no one, not even Armleder, has been able to pin down.

FABRICE STROUN: Over the years, numerous labels have been applied to your work: Fluxus, citationism, neo-geo, and many more, each focusing on a different facet of your practice. Some commentators have even pegged you as a forerunner of the “relational art” and design-as-art moment. To what do you attribute your work’s capacity to resonate with such different, and sometimes even contradictory, contexts of reception?

JOHN ARMLEDER: I’ve actually always liked it when my work is included in some new movement, even if the label is restrictive and even if the movement itself is just a fad, because the

previews September 2009

Jack Goldstein

For decades, the reception of Jack Goldstein’s work has followed a cyclical pattern—a fitting pattern, perhaps, for a man who staged his own disappearance in various ways throughout his life.

For decades, the reception of Jack Goldstein’s work has followed a cyclical pattern, whereby the complexity and wide-ranging influence of the artist’s practice snap into focus every few years, only to fade back into relative obscurity soon thereafter—a fitting pattern, perhaps, for a man who staged his own disappearance in various ways throughout his life. Starting as a post-Minimal sculptor based in Los Angeles during the early 1970s, Goldstein quickly moved into performances and films. The latter were initially made within the confines of his studio but by 1973 incorporated