print April 1993

Ken Lum

Comprising variously patterned and colored throw pillows of outsized proportions casually plopped down beside reductive, image-populated and text-inscribed paintings, Ken Lum’s oblique arrangement of works set in motion a scramble for hermeneutic points of entry. This peculiar ensemble also demanded a patient excavation of buried contents. In contrast to the social parody of certain of Lum’s previous efforts—his “Furniture Sculpture,” 1982-93, and “Portrait Logos,” 1984—a disturbing neutrality prevailed here. Meaning had to be teased out of the potential correspondences between objects and their

print March 1993

“The Naturalist Gathers”

In its arrangement of images that span the history of art, and film stills, book illustrations, postcards, and advertisements, “The Naturalist Gathers” presented a genealogy of the process of collecting, ordering, and observing. Devoid of “original” artworks, this fabric of pictures portrayed the world as a chain of mediated representations, illuminating how we organize experience and construct an “archaeology of knowledge.” Composed of materials from curator Douglas Blau’s own collection, this picture gallery within a gallery became something akin to an encyclopedic vanitas, filled with images

print February 1993

Matt Mullican

At once rationalist and (neo)Romanticist, technocratic and ambivalently spiritual, matt Mullican’s work has consistently traced a paradox of late-modern subjectivity: the tension between a private language code (resistant to the norms of everyday communication) and the desire to feed into the logic of our regulated, postindustrial society. This now familiar dualism of consciousness continues to galvanize Mullican’s practice, suggesting that the artist has always been most interested in articulating the unstable negotiation between the rational and the irrational. This dilemma was posed in the

print January 1993

Candida Höfer

If, as is often said, we live in a post-Enlightenment culture, it is only in the sense that new techniques with which to manufacture order (like the computer and television) have been invented. So while the classificatory systems of the Enlightenment, such as the archive, the library, and the museum, are becoming increasingly outmoded inventories of our “knowledge” of the world, they continue to operate as distinctly public sites of sociocultural organization.

It is in this respect that Candida Höfer’s work can be understood as having emerged from a lineage of German artmaking that remains firmly

print December 1992

“Fluxus: A Conceptual Country” and “Fluxattitudes”

Strongly influenced by Dada’s rebellious spirit and John Cage’s radical experimentalism, the artistic counter-movement known as Fluxus celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. George Maciunas, and a host of artists, writers, musicians, photographers, poets, performers, and filmmakers (including George Brecht, Robert Watts, and Dick Higgins) who passed through the philosophical filter of Fluxus during the ’60s and early ’70s, sought to “democratize” art by provoking the spectator to interact physically and intellectually with the work, requiring the viewer’s self-conscious participation in the

print November 1992

Silvia Kolbowski

The term “Formalism” continues to suffer from a rather parochial reduction to the status of a code word that refers exclusively to a circumscribed species of painting and sculpture. This conventional usage will not be dislodged easily, even though its companion notion of artistic purity insists by definition on an enforced balkanization of media that is untenable today. Art practices that are conceptual and directed at institutional critique are not exempt from spiraling into the tautological extremities of formalism, especially when the methodological mantles of seminal precursor artists such

Joshua Decter