Isabelle Graw

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  print November 2014

  OPENINGS: AVERY SINGER

  PAINTING, AS WE KNOW WELL BY NOW, has long since ceased to be regarded as dubious or even obsolete. Whereas artists painting in the 1970s and ’80s felt obliged to justify their medium in order to rescue it from its reputation of being a highly suspicious commodity fetish, painting has since the ’90s been regarded as an accepted—even radical—form of social, conceptual, and institutional critique. Entering a new, unbounded era, in part driven by the posthumous hype around the work of Martin Kippenberger and his disciples, the medium came into fashion yet again under the banner of “network

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  print December 2013

  Isabelle Graw

  THIS EXHIBITION WAS A FEAST: both visually delightful and a work of solid scholarship. Curators Susan Alyson Stein, Gloria Groom, and Guy Cogeval demonstrated with unprecedented clarity that fashion was the secret operating system underpinning the development of artistic production in France in the pivotal period from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. The show left no doubt that artists of the time were drawn toward the milieu of fashion, toward fashion itself as subject matter, and toward painterly techniques that emphasized the material qualities and textures that are clothing’s and painting’s

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  print Summer 2013

  Martin Kippenberger

  Hi, here I am, that must be enough.
  —Martin Kippenberger
  

  ALL OF BERLIN IS DELIGHTED: Martin Kippenberger is back in town. Contrary to popular belief, it was not in Cologne but here that the artist launched his career. It was in Berlin that he opened Kippenbergers Büro (an “office” specializing in communication) and where he served as bustling manager to the legendary punk club SO36. Inevitably, mention of his name is accompanied by nods to his unbounded lifestyle—as is currently the case at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, where “Martin Kippenberger: Sehr Gut | Very Good” is framed (via

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  print November 2012

  SOCIAL REALISM: THE ART OF JANA EULER

  YOU ARE YOUR NETWORK. This aphorism, freely adapted from theater director René Pollesch’s 2012 play Kill Your Darlings, trenchantly captures the new worth of connections and friendships in contemporary life. Of course, it is a well-known fact that social interactions have changed in the age of network capitalism (to use Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s term). We communicate more, assiduously accumulate the contacts that are now of such unprecedented value, and seize every opportunity to network that presents itself. And yet however well known or familiar this scenario is, it takes on a slightly

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  print Summer 2012

  Ellsworth Kelly

  THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, Ellsworth Kelly has continually worked in black and white, often in parallel to making the same forms in color. Devoted exclusively to his black-and-white works, this show, subtitled “Schwarz & Weiß” (Black & White), may have seemed intended to emphasize an elimination of the artist-subject in Kelly’s work. (The curator, Ulrich Wilmes, speaks of “eschewing the subjective, emotional weight resulting from the use of color.”) Yet the exhibition left no doubt that black and white can also create a sense of subjective, psychological space; and the inclusion of seventeen of the

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  print November 2011

  ECCE HOMO: ART AND SUBJECTHOOD

  THE RESURGENCE OF THE HUMAN FIGURE in much recent sculpture cannot be separated from a renewed attention to the idea of the subject. Although it is so commonplace as to go unnoticed, the idea of the artwork as a kind of subject in itself was one of the epochal inventions of modernity, crystallized in the radical shift in aesthetic theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At that juncture, it was specifically tied to painting: For Hegel, sculpture was able to “create a unity between body and spirit,” but painting alone allowed in a more abstract “principle of subjectivity.” In recent

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  print November 2010

  CHARACTER STUDY: THE ART OF MICHAELA MEISE

  THE HUMAN BODY—that ghost of monumentality and figuration inexorably haunting modernism—is ever present in Michaela Meise’s work. Whether, in her numerous films, she takes on the pose of a neoclassical sculpture (as in Étude Carpeaux, 2008) or presents herself as a ballerina trapped in a gated community in South Africa (as in Ballerina Diary, 2001), she always makes sure her body is what everything else must relate to. And although Meise’s sculptural objects at first glance appear dry and reserved, on closer inspection they no less distinctly refer to the figural. Usually made of plywood panels

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  print December 2008

  Isabelle Graw

  WITH A SUMMER COLLECTION that applied clichéd markers of painting (drips, splashes, areas off leaking color) to shoes and clothes, Yves Saint Laurent designer Stefano Pilati once again proved himself a worthy successor to his house’s great namesake, to whom France bid farewell this year with a state funeral. In that country Saint Laurent is seen as the most important artist since Picasso—a striking demonstration of the ultimate victory fashion has won over the fine arts in Paris, where fashion seems not only to have stolen the idea of modern art but also to have an ever-expanding cultural

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  print April 2008

  ART AND ITS MARKETS: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

  EVEN AS GOLD rises and the dollar falls, the expansion of the global art market shows few signs of reversal. This growth has been characterized by incredible immediacy, liquidity, and transparency—but also by inequity, archaic ritual, and social spectacle. Indeed, the economy of art is now both wildly speculative and idiosyncratically regulated, with unparalleled levels of attention devoted to the work of contemporary artists. What are the diverse factors that have contributed to this radical extension of interest and investment in the art of our day? And to what extent have these elements either transformed or reinscribed historical relationships among art’s audiences, institutions, collecting practices, and criticism? How might we best distinguish our present moment from previously bullish episodes and their attendant redefinitions of the aesthetic and the commoditized?
   
  From the fiscal to the formal, multiple arenas of knowledge are implicated in answering such questions. With this complex set of interrelationships in mind, Artforum invited a cross-section of figures—ranging from collector and curator to art historian and auction-house expert—to discuss the ways in which different kinds of value accrue to works of art and affect their production, display, and circulation: Ai Weiwei, Beijing-based artist; Amy Cappellazzo, international cohead of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s; Thomas Crow, professor of modern art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University; Donna De Salvo, chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Isabelle Graw, a founding editor of Texte zur Kunst and professor of art history and theory at Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt; Dakis Joannou, collector and president of the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece; and Robert Pincus-Witten, scholar and critic, and former director of exhibitions at L & M Arts in New York. Scholar and critic James Meyer and Artforum editor Tim Griffin moderate the discussion.

  THE GLOBAL BOOM

  James Meyer: The extraordinary boom of the contemporary market in recent years, along with the globalization of art’s production and display—two related phenomena—are among the most pressing subjects in any discussion of current practice. The history of modernism is in part a history of the marketing of the new. The Peau d’Ours sale in 1914, which brought a record price for Pablo Picasso’s Family of Acrobats [1905]; the first Parke-Bernet auction of contemporary art in 1965, which featured Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture; and the sale of the Scull Collection

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  print October 2007

  Josephine Pryde

  Josephine Pryde’s exhibitions always appear straightforwardly thematic, then become more and more perplexing the longer you think about them. Her recent show, “Hollow Inside,” was no exception: Her new diagrams of yoga positions—in chains mounted on Plexiglas—might seem clear enough, but then you started to wonder why multiple-exposure head shots of bewildered-looking sheep were hung on the walls around them. The photographs of staring sheep look blurry and hallucinatory; in some cases, the technique of multiple exposure creates more than two eyes. It is as if our own perplexity were materialized

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  print March 2006

  PERIPHERAL VISION: THE ART OF JUTTA KOETHER

  FEW PEOPLE IN COLOGNE in the ’80s and early ’90s knew quite what to make of Jutta Koether’s paintings. Koether was admired for her astute theoretical essays on art and music, which appeared in the legendary German culture magazine Spex and elsewhere, but these writings seemed nearly irreconcilable with her deliberately clumsy, apparently crude pictures. How was one to understand a work like, say, Portrait Robert Johnson? Painted entirely in Koether’s then-signature blackish red pigments, this 1990 diptych—for the record, one of my favorite paintings—features on one panel a flatly rendered face,

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  print January 2006

  Jörg Immendorff

  THE EMINENT SPEAKERS at the September opening of Jörg Immendorff’s Neue Nationalgalerie retrospective “Male Lago: Unsichtbarer Beitrag” (Male Lago: Invisible Contribution), included Gerhard Schröder, who just a few days earlier, on the eve of Germany’s federal elections, had made a remarkable appearance on national television. Clearly exhausted after weeks of campaign battles he still exuberantly claimed to be the only person in the country able to form a government. By the time of the opening, despite the fact that most voters had actually cast their ballots for the various parties of the Left,