Martin Herbert

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  print May 2008

  Paul McCarthy

  FOUR DECADES IN, Paul McCarthy’s art might easily be considered repetitious, overblown, big-budget, anxiously relentless. Is that his problem, or is it America’s? The question is worth asking, if only because McCarthy, like Warhol before him, totes a get-out-of-critique-free card: His art is a mirror to his homeland’s times, at best the convex type that allows a view around blind bends—though should it descend into costly gibbering spectacle, there are always enough analogues and portents in the parent culture to still render it defensible. Even so, there are inevitably qualitative variations

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  print April 2008

  PUBLIC RETRACTION: BRITISH ARTS FUNDING

  EVER SINCE WORLD WAR II, the arts in England—as elsewhere in Europe—have been generously if variably funded by the government, by means of the Arts Council of Great Britain, which was split into four independent organizations, for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, in 1994. If not quite the envy of the world, the level of funding provided by Arts Council England has certainly been the envy of America, where investment in the arts is largely a private affair. Whereas the Arts Council will invest £417 million ($836 million) in the arts this year alone, the United States (federal,

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  print March 2008

  “The World as a Stage” and “A Theatre Without Theatre”

  ONE WOULD THINK I’d have been ready. Performance has become such a catchword in contemporary art circles, as artists and critics alike seek to characterize the current shifts in production toward acting out or interacting with audiences—frequently in order to intersect artistic practice with political agency and redefinitions of protest—that I ought to have entered Tate Modern’s “The World as a Stage” with ears prickling and eyeballs peeled. Yet here we were: The museum attendant, handing me the exhibition pamphlet, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Saturday night parking.” And

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  print January 2008

  FILLING THE VOID: THE ART OF MUNGO THOMSON

  MUNGO THOMSON’S The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan 1963–1995, 1999, is a compact disc with a hole in the middle—not just literally, but metaphorically, too. For while the recording encompasses, in chronological order, all the live albums made by the Minnesota-born singer-songwriter for Columbia Records over the course of thirty-two years, one crucial component is missing: Dylan’s music. Every song has been edited out, leaving a twenty-five-minute flow of crowd noises that rise, like grit-filled waves, in gently clattering crescendos, then break, recede, and build again, sometimes

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  previews January 2008

  “Double Agent”

  Reflecting the thematic hook of “art in which the artist uses other people as a medium,” this exhibition will be a roll call of key players: Pawel Althamer, Phil Collins, Dora García, Joe Scanlan, Barbara Visser, Artur Zmijewski, and theatrical firebrand Christoph Schlingensief—and behind them, a shadow squad of auxiliary producers.

  Despite the title, put aside thoughts of espionage. In the sense intended by the ICA's Mark Sladen and guest curator Claire Bishop—who has written eloquently on participatory aeshetics for this magazine and elsewhere—“double agent” instead connotes “doubled agency.” Reflecting the thematic hook of “art in which the artist uses other people as a medium,” this exhibition will be a roll call of key players: Pawel Althamer, Phil Collins, Dora García, Joe Scanlan, Barbara Visser, Artur Zmijewski, and theatrical firebrand Christoph Schlingensief—and behind them,

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  previews January 2008

  “Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art”

  The opening chapter of Thierry de Duve's 1998 Kant After Duchamp—which inspired this offbeat group show—is a rare example of art theory as seen through the eyes of a Martian anthropologist. Here, that approach gets refashioned as a curatorial principle: Aliens, we're told, have acquired some 150 works by practitioners as diverse as Cai Guo-Quiang, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Cornelia Parker, and have categorized their artifacts according to presumed function rather than the earthly codifications of contemporary art.

  The opening chapter of Thierry de Duve's 1998 Kant After Duchamp—which inspired this offbeat group show—is a rare example of art theory as seen through the eyes of a Martian anthropologist. Here, that approach gets refashioned as a curatorial principle: Aliens, we're told, have acquired some 150 works by practitioners as diverse as Cai Guo-Quiang, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Cornelia Parker, and have categorized their artifacts according to presumed function rather than the earthly codifications of contemporary art. This sculpture-dominant exhibition—a

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  performance September 2007

  “Il Tempo del Postino”

  For a joint commission between the Manchester International Festival and the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and artist Philippe Parreno orchestrated a series of performances by artists, which premiered last July at the Opera House in Manchester, UK. Artforum asked two of its regular contributors to give their impressions of the works presented onstage.

  MARTIN HERBERT

  FOR “IL TEMPO DEL POSTINO” (The Time of the Postman), which took place on three evenings this past July in Manchester, curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno offered contemporary artists not previously

• previews September 2007

  Biennale de Lyon

  Some forty curators and critics each have selected an artist who best represents “The 00s” (included are Ryan Gander, Mai-Thu Perret, and Thomas Bayrle); meanwhile, about twenty artists will design, in various media, a system or “set of strategies” to define this decade in progress.

  Past Lyon Biennales have frequently felt like think tanks devoted to how biennials might best operate—a trend this ninth edition, titled “The 00s: The History of a Decade That Has Not Been Named,” looks likely to continue. Promising “a history and geography manual in the form of a gam,” the curators have asked international art-world players to give form to this period: Some forty curators and critics each have selected an artist who best represents it (included are Ryan Gander, Mai-Thu Perret, and Thomas Bayrle); meanwhile, about twenty artists

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  previews September 2007

  Trisha Donnelly

  What Trisha Donnelly's feels like, though—as her first major UK show, consisting entirely of one large, interlinked installation, will likely evince—is the output of someone who, not content with bookish chatter about the economy of desire, instead strategizes to register its effects on our shortchanged selves.

  Trisha Donnelly tends to deal in displacement, homing in on barely communicable transcendent or liminal experiences. The San Francisco–based artist’s work includes video of herself performing a rain dance and imitating a rock star’s onstage euphoria; blunt, documentary-style photographs of the dancer Frances Flannery enacting a baffling ritual; allusive yet maddeningly obscure semi-abstract drawings; and such interventions as sounding two brief cascades of organ music at the start and finish of gallery hours, thereby opening up a caesura. Accordingly, churls might call

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  print May 2007

  Steve McQueen

  FOR THE PAST thirty-five years, the Art Commissions Committee of London’s Imperial War Museum has invited artists to make work responding to the activities of British and Commonwealth troops, whether they be engaged in combat or in peacekeeping missions. This privately run successor to the country’s official war artists’ program (which was created in 1916, partly for propaganda purposes, and dismantled in 1972) has thrown up the occasional attention-grabbing artwork—notably, Langlands & Bell’s interactive digital animation, The House of Osama Bin Laden, 2003, a detailed re-creation of the

• previews May 2007

  Lucian Freud

  Eighty-five this December, Lucian Freud remains portrait painting’s point man—even Elizabeth II allowed him to portray her, in 2001, as a fretful housewife in a diamond diadem. Artists canonized in their lifetime risk being taken for granted, however, making a retrospective such as this necessary to remind audiences of Freud’s work’s piercing, undomesticated effect. The exhibition will show seventy works, among them several new canvases, including an intricate view of the artist’s garden. Rehearsing Freud’s progression from finicky pairings of people and plants to

• previews May 2007

  Martin Boyce

  Martin Boyce’s shape-shifting art brings back the ghosts of modernism: battered replicas of Eames cabinets; nighttime city scenes evoked in sketchy, shadowy installations of chain-link fences next to trees made from fluorescent tubing; noirish phrases such as OVER YOUR SHOULDER glimmering on the walls in a Saul Bass–esque font. This show, the Scottish artist’s most extensive to date, is loosely inspired by Haruki Murakami’s hallucinatory novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997). It immerses visitors in a series of six large installations featuring fragments of the