Martin Herbert

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  print February 2012

  OPENINGS: ED ATKINS

  ONE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING high-definition digital video is via statistics: If the pixels-per-image count is anywhere above 920,000, it’s high-def. But a more nuanced characterization, and one less likely to be repurposed for advertising copy, appears in Ed Atkins’s unpublished 2011 text “Some Notes on High Definition with Apologies to M. Blanchot.” “High Definition (HD) has surpassed what we tamely imagined to be the zenith of representational affectivity within the moving image,” the twenty-nine-year-old London-based artist writes, “presenting us with lucid, liquid images that are at once both

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  previews January 2012

  Zarina Bhimji

  Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, filmmaker, photographer, and installation artist Zarina Bhimji nevertheless remains a hazily contoured creative presence.

  Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, filmmaker, photographer, and installation artist Zarina Bhimji nevertheless remains a hazily contoured creative presence. That’s perhaps due to the delicacy of her work, which dusts for traces of human occupation in landscape and architecture: Her film of a verdant Ugandan vista, Out of the Blue, 2002, for example, countersigns its imagery with the nondiegetic sounds of voices and crackling fire, hitching together the story of Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of his country’s Asian citizens—the artist among them—and the

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  previews January 2012

  “Le Silence. Une Fiction”

  At last, curators are admitting that their concepts are artifices, frameworks for imposing specific readings on multivalent works of art.

  At last, curators are admitting that their concepts are artifices, frameworks for imposing specific readings on multivalent works of art. How else to explain the recent flurry of exhibitions themed—with sweet-natured playfulness—around fictions? Sci-fi, that most imaginative of modes, has been particularly popular, and in this show, the backstory involves an uninhabitable planet (our own, of course) and a failed attempt by its tenants to colonize another one. What supposedly remains of the extinct civilization is seen here: sixty-some

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  previews September 2011

  “Museum Show”

  How do you fit several dozen museums into one medium-size art institution? It helps if they’re all at least semifictional and manageably scaled, as in this forty- artist survey of museological mimicries

  How do you fit several dozen museums into one medium-size art institution? It helps if they’re all at least semifictional and manageably scaled, as in this forty- artist survey of museological mimicries. The reflexive finale of the Arnolfini’s year of fiftieth birthday celebrations, the show collates the continuum from Marcel Duchamp’s 1943 monographic trove in a suitcase, the Bôite-en-valise, to Marcel Broodthaers’s grand upending of taxonomic categories, to quixotic present-day examples such as Bill Burns’s Museum of Safety Gear for Small Animals. (Plus, expect turns by Stuart

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  news May 2011

  Artangel’s twentieth anniversary

  IF YOU’VE PAID ATTENTION to contemporary art in Britain since the early 1990s, the chances are good that Artangel—the exemplary, catalytic, London-based arts trust currently marking its twentieth anniversary—has gifted you with some indelible memories. Numerous spikes in the graph of my own spectatorship correspond to site-specific projects that codirectors James Lingwood and Michael Morris have commissioned, financed, and helped conceptualize. 1993: Rachel Whiteread’s House, a spectral plaster cast of the interior of an East London house, last survivor of a demolished terrace and

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  print May 2011

  Susan Hiller

  IN 1974, following several years in which she ritually renounced painting––chopping old canvases into little rectangles and stitching them together into tomblike blocks, preserving the ashes of burned works in vials––Susan Hiller found her enduring subject with Dream Mapping. Articulated via dream diaries (seen at Tate Britain in vitrines) kept by seven people sleeping within “fairy rings” of mushrooms in a supposedly enchanted Hampshire field, this lasting topic was the stubborn, abyssal irrationality of the human mind. On the evidence of Tate Britain’s forty-year survey, curated by Ann Gallagher

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  previews May 2011

  “Secret Societies”

  From Yale’s president-spawning Skull and Bones to that mythical “invisible world government” the Illuminati, secret societies exert a powerful grip on the imagination.

  From Yale’s president-spawning Skull and Bones to that mythical “invisible world government” the Illuminati, secret societies exert a powerful grip on the imagination. The Schirn Kunsthalle’s show isn’t an exposé, though. Rather, it proposes contemporary art itself as a seedbed for clandestine coteries, exacting codes of behavior, and diverse methods of evasion and exclusion. Here, within an appositely labyrinthine display designed by Fabian Marti, more than one hundred works by nearly fifty artists—including Kenneth Anger, Joachim Koester,

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  print March 2011

  Simon Starling

  FOUR TIMES SINCE 2005, Camden Arts Centre has crossed its fingers and handed the curatorial reins to an artist. After Tacita Dean, Steven Claydon, and Paulina Olowska, most recently it was Simon Starling’s turn, and it was notable and apposite that this marked the first occasion when the neophyte curator’s name surged above his or her chosen title, because “Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts)”—mounted almost exactly a decade after Starling’s own solo show here—was especially consonant with its selector’s artistic practice: that of resituating and reanimating objects

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  previews January 2011

  John Stezaker

  After forty years of sifting through antique photographs from thrift shops and flea markets—and then cropping and conjoining them to crowbar open their meanings—John Stezaker is finally being recognized at home.

  After forty years of sifting through antique photographs from thrift shops and flea markets—and then cropping and conjoining them to crowbar open their meanings—John Stezaker is finally being recognized at home. The ninety-plus works in his first UK retrospective should appear as a singularly unified whole, for the sexagenarian artist (who is still augmenting series he initiated three decades ago) hasn’t so much evolved as finessed his aptitude for the uncanny. As Stezaker dramatizes the irrational hold that particular images exert on him by, say, a virtuoso

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  print November 2010

  UNBOUNDED ENTHUSIASMS: THE ART OF BOJAN ŠARČEVIĆ

  “TO WHAT EXTENT SHOULD AN ARTIST understand the implications of his or her findings?” This is the cryptic question that Bojan Šarčević posed to a panel of artists, critics, and curators he’d convened on the occasion of his 2006 two-venue exhibition in Ireland, at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo. The show debuted a group of works—miniature geometries of brass threads dangling almost imperceptibly against an expanse of elegantly distressed wallpaper—that appeared far from the kind of research-based production his query would seem to address.

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  print May 2010

  OPENINGS: JOS DE GRUYTER AND HARALD THYS

  FOR ALMOST A DECADE, Jos de Gruyter worked at Ten Weyngaert, a Brussels community center that began as a utopian experiment in the 1980s. Intended as a place that citizens could visit in order to freely express their creativity—a latter-day Esalen—the center is now frequented, de Gruyter says, by disaffected individuals: failed artists, retired yoga instructors, and so on. These denizens often partake in art therapy programs there; when invited to access their imaginative inner worlds through such sessions, they often become confused, angry, or depressed, and the ensuing atmosphere of silence

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  print April 2010

  THIRD LIFE: THE ART OF JOHN STEZAKER

  FOR SOME LUCKY PHOTOGRAPHS, there’s an interval between disfavor and disposal—a hiatus that offers a second chance at life. In our disembodied age, this purgatory is usually the wilds of eBay, although prints and reproductions also linger on in actual flea markets, antiquarian bookstores, and thrift shops. Few photographs, however, are discarded and restored more than once—unless they happen to be swept up in the vicissitudes of John Stezaker’s forty-year career. Some of the pictures the artist has used have inhabited this liminal state multiple times, their drift and resurgence tracing an