passages January 2004

Mario Merz

IF I CLOSE MY EYES, I can still envision my first encounter with Mario Merz in 1966 at his studio in Turin, which marked the beginning of my long friendship and collaboration with him as a fellow nomad and adventurer, a journey unbroken until his death on November 9, 2003. In the series of rooms where he worked, the artist’s triangular structures projected out from the walls and floors. Made of fabric and woven bamboo, they brought to mind the shaped canvases being produced at the time by Frank Stella and others and were splashed with red paint (as well as scorched with burn holes), evoking the

print September 1993

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Man in Polyester Suit

EROS RULES THE world, and Robert Mapplethorpe celebrates eros. But rather than locating eros in a single, unambiguous sex, whether male or female, his photographs honor it for the multiplicity of its expressions, for its variety, for the confusions of identity it creates. For Mapplethorpe there is no passion that eros excludes, no boundaries it knows. His is a satisfied, inclusive eros, always reaching out for new life. It is inexhaustible. And it is totally without guilt over the desire to love and to be loved, without limit.

Mapplethorpe’s work has emotional tenderness as well as sex. Desire

print Summer 1992

Marisa’s Swing

Art is an effort at healing, a shield against a reality of intolerable human and social conflict. A system of rituals, tactics, methods, and projects of thought and behavior, a network of motions and actions, clamors and silences, art offers the only possible truths, the only viable rescues from the existential shipwreck. Art is less flexible, more resistant, than the “scientific” forms of knowledge, which can always be contradicted by reality and subsumed in it. Art approaches experience but is not distorted by it—it keeps a distance. Art operates in protected territory, it makes itself a lair.

print Summer 1991

THE INSIDE SKINSIDE: WIM DELVOYE

IN DESIGN AND FASHION as in war, to apply camouflage and makeup to an object or living body is to put its identity in play. There is an ambiguity: the thing is confused with its context, and attention is deflected from its true character. A clothed or made-up body can confuse the distinction between the sexes, just as a wrapped or painted object can become indecipherable, can deceive one as to its nature. Made up or masked, the man becomes a mannequin and the object becomes a machine. The female and the male, the technological and the natural, the functional and the decorative, abandon their

print November 1990

CONJUNCT, CITY OF LIGHT: A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM

MARIA NORDMAN CONJUNCT CITY OF LIGHT

A work is initiated with the following collaborator:
a person who has an age of several hours or days.

CHOICES OF CONSTRUCTION:

The joinery used in this work can continue into the formation of a city.

Every element is joined with the others,
so that none is separate or apart. The building of the new
city is possible with the cooperation of at least three persons.

Every element that is disengaged appears separately in
another time and another place. (Unpredetermined by
geography.)

Every element will stay near to every other one, without
touching the others directly.

print April 1990

RITES AND SITES: HANS HOLLEIN

The performances of sacrificial rites and the erection or nomination of sacred places are one of the prime occupations of man. Directly obvious or camouflaged, they help to constitute life. Some civilizations today have lost their capacity e.g. for death rites. It is a sign of loss of capacity for living.
—Hans Hollein

FOR HANS HOLLEIN, architecture is a metaphysical instance of community rather than the result of some moment of intellectual grace. Designing and building are conditions ritual and magical, rooted in the fabric of a collective belief. Referring to an “elsewhere” apart from ordinary

print October 1988

LUCIANO FABRO: THE IMAGE THAT ISN'T THERE

ACCORDING TO LUCIANO FABRO, sculpture is a metaphor and allegory for sculpting. The artist, then, rather than cultivating his or her own identity, must pay attention to art’s identity: must face the immensity of a flood of “things"; must question everything that seems to have been already thought out; must be willing to travel from rhetoric to linguistics to reveal the process of creativity itself. The art that emerges from such explorations will win out over any motif, found or invented; for it will serve, as Fabro puts it, as “consciousness in movement, . . . an invention that disturbs the

print February 1988

ABOUT THIS ISSUE: AGE, A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM

The following conversation is an excerpt from the editorial discussion that explored some of the reasons for doing this issue. It preceded our meetings with our guests in this project.

Ingrid Sischy, 35: I think the place for us to start, just so we get our ground, is to try to roughly sketch out why we want to take on these three letters a g e in the first place.

Thomas McEvilley, 48: Well right away we’d better talk about the problem of using the word “age.” I mean for one thing, when you bring this up to someone and you say We’d like to have a conversation with you about age, they immediately

print December 1987

Haim Steinbach's Wild Wild West

THE ELEMENTS THAT HAIM STEINBACH chooses for incorporation in his art most often come from the field of the mass-produced object, a flat field in which very little distinguishes itself from anything else and even less has a permanent place. Destined to vanish, these objects are the mysterious sphinxes of our culture. Steinbach has found them in the mazes and seas of stuff that constitute the supermarket, in the wild landscapes of the antique shop, the forests of the flea market. Following the Duchampian tradition, he individuates elements with his gaze, extracting them from the magmatic mass of

print September 1987

WHAT WAS THAT MASKED MUSEUM?

SINCE THE RENAISSANCE, THERE HAVE been museum architects who have cherished the symbolic and mythic aspect of art, with the particular myth in question being that of the good, the beautiful, the pure world set apart from the impure present. These architects have imagined the site of art as a nonplace (ou-topos), a happy place (eu-topos). Whether controlled by the prince, the church, the merchant, or the state, the museum has been designed metaphorically as a city of the sun, a Civitas Dei, the cathedrallike cocoon of a better world, a place of pilgrimage to which the faithful can rush in their

print May 1987

TALKING ARCHITECTURE

ARCHITECTURE IS OFTEN SEEN as inflexible, a branch of creativity that performs the functions and services we need it to yet also petrifies spaces and materials, fixing the order of things as they are. To view architecture this way is to deny its dynamic nature. A discipline simultaneously scientific and imaginative, architecture, no less than art, is capable of a constant reconstruction and reopening of history. Though it is innately more imbricated with function and finance than art, architects no less than artists can admit into their work their dreams and their fears, their rational ambitions

print December 1986

ART TO THE POWER N

IN THE WEST TODAY, one of the few kinds of faith in immortality that remains vital is faith in art. Despite the view of certain artists and art movements as phantoms of significance, as the emperor’s new clothes, art is generally viewed as something of great cultural value that will still be here when things contemporaneous with it are gone. This is not to disparage other sorts of artifacts, but rather to speak of art as a deliberate choice of a vision whose life is lived not only through whatever renown it achieves or does not achieve when new, but long after its creator and its original context

Germano Celant