previews September 2018

“RUTH ASAWA: LIFE’S WORK”

Fortunately, our modernist sculptural legacy does not consist only of huge chunks of metal pressing weightily against the earth. We also have the great artist of floating worlds, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), to look to, whose biomorphic and figurative forms, often made of intricately intertwined wire hovering at eye level, trade the material and metaphoric opacity of iron, bronze, and steel for translucent architectures and spatial mapping. The Pulitzer attempts a major reassessment of Asawa’s career, featuring roughly eighty works of sculpture and drawing that include

print September 2016

Jason Moran

As many a musician or barback can tell you, a live-music nightclub—sadly, today they call them venues—is a strange place during off-hours, whether that is 3 PM or 3 AM. Unlike a theater or cinema, which might play to an audience of one, a nightclub requires people; early in the day and very late at night, the nightclub uniquely evokes simultaneous feelings of loss and potential. In “STAGED,” Jason Moran—the visionary musician, composer, impresario, and visual artist—set two architecturally scaled sculptures kitty-corner to each other, each a reimagined version of the main

passages April 27, 2016

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015)

CERTAIN ARTISTS TEACH. Every time I encounter a painting by Ellsworth Kelly, I learn this lesson again: A painting is not just an image, or even an object; it can also be a kind of architecture. I’ve always felt a compulsion to look closely at the edges of Kelly’s paintings, carefully examining the various ways in which he continues the painting beyond its front edge. Each time I lean into a wall in an attempt to look behind one of his works, I am left with the sense that even though I can see the way he has built the painting, I still do not fully understand how it is that the painting appears

print December 2015

the Best of 2015

TO TAKE STOCK OF THE PAST YEAR, ARTFORUM ASKED AN INTERNATIONAL GROUP OF ARTISTS TO SELECT A SINGLE IMAGE, EXHIBITION, OR EVENT THAT MOST MEMORABLY CAPTURED THEIR EYE IN 2015.

YUJI AGEMATSU

Silicone snake, West 42nd and Broadway, New York, July 29, 2015.

RON NAGLE

This picture was taken along the waterfront in San Francisco’s Mission Bay area. This area is extremely scenic, with old battleships and boats. I go there frequently to walk my dog, relax, and enjoy the fantastic views. The pier is used to store various components for seasonal parades or events. This grouping of floats for the Pride

print September 2014

Josiah McElheny

LIFEBOAT

JEFF KOONS is like Alfred Hitchcock. Deeply invested in entertaining us with their personal obsessions, both the filmmaker and the artist have gone to great lengths to produce visual gratification. But underneath such diversions lies an unconscious desire for control—and an ocean of fear, the real subject of their art. Koonsian dread often arrives in sculptures depicting objects in uncanny likeness, transforming recognizably cheap, everyday things into metaphors about anxiety and death. Stuff that should disintegrate, or at least deflate, becomes fixed in time, not unlike the faces

previews September 2014

“Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia"

Every band I have ever known has had at least one artist in its entourage; somebody has to make the posters and the album covers. For Devo, an absurdist punk-rock band formed in 1972 whose members were influenced by the aesthetics of Russian Futurism, just about everyone in the group was an artist—including Mark Mothersbaugh. The artist’s first retrospective shows us—with works dating from the 1960s to the present, including photocollages, kinetic musical sculptures, 30,000 underground-comics-style works on paper, and even a double-ended car—that Mothersbaugh

print November 2013

Josiah McElheny

IN 2011, a modest space in Venice designed by the celebrated architect Carlo Scarpa was designated a public monument and museum. It was an unlikely candidate for elevation to canonical status: A street-level commercial showroom on San Marco Square, commissioned by the Italian manufacturer Olivetti in 1957, the space was filled with typewriters displayed on an assortment of custom pedestals, stairs, cantilevers, shelves, niches, and floating planes. With its lyrical square window peeking out onto a side street and an elegant storefront, displaying just three perfectly curvilinear machines, the

passages May 2013

Oscar Niemeyer

JOSIAH McELHENY

There is no form without politics, just as there is no form without context; one finds the politics in the way form is embedded in its context.

—Martin Beck

SINCE THE END OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION IN 1923—the failure of which led Walter Gropius and many of the artists and architects of the former Berlin “Art Soviet” to renounce their dreams of an activist leftist aesthetic—it has been commonplace for modernist architects to carefully distance themselves from political identification. Perhaps this deliberate severing of modern architecture from its origins as a visionary

previews January 2013

“Hilma Af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction”

A few of us may still remember the 1989 exhibition “Secret Pictures by Hilma af Klint” at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the title is still apt. Much of the artist’s work has been carefully kept as a kind of time capsule by her family’s foundation, unseen in more than eight decades. Now, with this essential retrospective—the culmination of Müller-Westermann’s multiyear research into the artist’s work—we can finally embrace the truth: Af Klint invented geometric abstract painting, just preceding Kandinsky and Malevich. Some might ascribe her

books April 2010

Josef Albers's Interaction of Color

Josef Albers, Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 269 pages, 2 vols.

THE LAVISH NEW EDITION of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, first published in 1963, arrives in two cloth-covered volumes of blue and green (or, some might say, green and yellow). They contain a poetic, lilting text that is studded with aphorisms and plates of mostly abstract images—color experiments accompanied by instructions on how to understand the effects that they demonstrate. Together, the tomes meticulously reconstruct the core elements of Albers’s famous color course,

print October 2007

READYMADE RESISTANCE: ART AND THE FORMS OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION

Whether by faking, borrowing, or stealing, artists today commonly produce works of art that employ the vocabulary of industry. This is not surprising if one considers the extent to which the broader contemporary language of form derives from the global corporate system. Unlike in earlier eras, nearly all products now draw on the collective labor of large numbers of people. We are supposed to be contented consumers of the factory-made wares of our brothers, sisters, and distant unheralded cousins in Asia. The message is that the individual can no longer be a producer of things except in highly

print February 2007

Josef Hoffmann

TODAY DESIGN RULES. The notion of a designed world, a designed home, a designed life has penetrated deep into consumer consciousness through reality TV shows, magazines, and huge stores dedicated to the concept. Architects and the product industry promote customization, while Chinese factories can imitate virtually any existing style. “Josef Hoffmann: Interiors, 1902–1913” at New York’s Neue Galerie reveals an extreme example of the impulse to create an environment unified by design, and re-creates in grand detail an early collision of past styles with the forms of industrialized labor and

books December 2006

THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

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

JOHN BALDESSARI

Kierkegaard once said that his goal in writing was to make life difficult for people. I read Edward Said’s On Late Style (Pantheon) because its title suggested that it might offer insights into my life’s pursuit of trying to understand art. The subtitle of the book is Music and Literature Against the Grain. The photo of Said on the back cover shows his shirt collar slightly askew, which I chose to understand as an unintended message.

There are no artists (in the narrow sense) discussed, but the book contains

previews May 2006

“Best of Friends: Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi”

Buckminster Fuller's friend and sometime collaborator Isamu Noguchi made a one-tenth-scale prototype of the groundbreaking vehicle—its streamlined design part Machine Age, part Amazing Stories—which will be featured in this exhibition of some forty models, sculptures, and photographs selected by Shoji Sadao, former Noguchi Foundation director and a longtime collaborator with both men.

Buckminster Fuller was a brilliant polymath who invented the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion car—a fanciful, fuel-saving, three-wheeled automobile of the future. His friend and sometime collaborator Isamu Noguchi made a one-tenth-scale prototype of the groundbreaking vehicle—its streamlined design part Machine Age, part Amazing Stories—which will be featured in this exhibition of some forty models, sculptures, and photographs selected by Sadao, former Noguchi Foundation director and a longtime collaborator with both men. Noguchi is considered a reconciler of