Martin Herbert

• previews May 2006

  Marc Quinn

  What form should portraiture take in the twenty-first century? As this show of thirty recent works by Marc Quinn ought to demonstrate, the human form is multifariously definable: Bronzes cast from chunks of animal meat have us as raw corporeality waiting for the slab; in his “DNA Portraits,” the artist schematizes identity into bacterial colonies in agar jelly using samples of human genomes; white marble representations of the physically handicapped challenge traditional conceptions of heroism and beauty. The last’s ironic interplay with damaged classical sculptures

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  interviews April 2006

  1000 WORDS: ANGELA BULLOCH

  FROM THE POINTEDLY economical gestures with which she began her career—amps dimming or brightening in the viewer’s presence (Before and After Follow Each Other, 1990); recordings of applause or jeers triggered by visitors’ movements (as in Laughing Crowd Sound Piece, 1990)—to the polyphonic, multihued blend of geometric structures and son et lumière in which she specializes today, Angela Bulloch has progressively deepened a practice fascinated with ordering systems and the subjective processing of information. Inflecting the stringent aesthetics of Conceptualism and Minimalism with destabilizing

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  diary March 06, 2006

  Ruf Trade

  London

  Midway through last Tuesday’s opening of the third Tate Triennial, a substantial percentage of the assembled guests set aside their cocktails and their chicken tikka–filled mini-ciabattas, and trooped out to the Tate Britain’s front lawn to watch one of Cerith Wyn Evans’s characteristic firework texts go up in smoke. As the gunpowder parcels ignited on a pair of metal armatures, fleetingly spelling out in white a two-verse poem by Ian Hamilton Finlay—in which permutations of the phrases “How blue / How sad / How small / How white / How far” are repeated, each ending once with an exclamation

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  print March 2006

  Ugo Rondinone

  “Every day I set less store on intellect,” writes Marcel Proust in the essay “Against Sainte-Beuve,” privileging instinct and sensorial experience instead. In Ugo Rondinone’s first major London show, he would seem to work in the same spirit, since the exhibition’s melancholic title—“zero built a nest in my navel”—clearly speaks to gut feelings. Indeed, audiences at the Whitechapel Art Gallery initially have little else to go on, experiencing a considerable interlude of rebuffed quizzicality on first entering the galleries, followed by the realization that Rondinone’s cryptic installation is

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  print March 2006

  Bob and Roberta Smith

  Brother-and-sister act Bob and Roberta Smith (no relation to the New York Times’s art scribe) is one—or, more accurately, two—of several pseudonymous identities that the British artist born Patrick Brill has adopted while distributing his homespun, semi-anarchic output over the past decade. But more than that, I am Bob and Roberta Smith—or so stated several button badges purchasable at Hales’s entrance; another recurrent phrase was ART NOT WAR.

  Declarative sentences, usually brightly painted on salvaged wood and reveling in the inept graphic flourishes of a novice sign-writer, are the tragicomic

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  print February 2006

  Andrew Mania

  Outside is polyglot East London, but once inside Andrew Mania’s show “Gogolin” we are in Poland—albeit a Poland of the mind that compounds past and present, authentic and imaginary. The artist’s name, stenciled next to the entrance, reads as “Andrzej Mania”; the wall beside the reception desk bears a pointedly untranslated lyric from a Polish polka that, I later discover, concerns a woman’s departure from her partner. She’s going to Gogolin, in the country’s Krapkowice region, but she can’t tell him why. Sometimes, as when life feels stale, predictable, lacking romance, you just have to go.

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  print January 2006

  CINEMATIC AFFECTS: THE ART OF RUNA ISLAM

  MARTIN HERBERT surveys the artist’s films in which coolly hypnotic, oblique narratives—haunted by the afterimages of ’60s avant-garde auteurs—straddle the borders between cinema and sculpture, art house and art gallery.

  I CAN’T HELP IT: I know the female character in Runa Islam’s five-minute 16 mm film Dead Time, 2000, is merely a cipher, a manipulated integer in a calculus of cinematic affectivity—but my heart goes out to her anyway. There she is in the first shot, framed against a blank sky, nearly expressionless yet radiating a sense of the kind of authentic interior life it often takes a

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  print January 2006

  Jaki Irvine

  Soho’s Frith Street is no stranger to spooky goings-on. At No. 22, John Logie Baird invented the television: The crossover between the Victorian inventor’s wave-channeling invention and his belief in Spiritualism was evoked, some years ago, in a series of wraithlike projections by Tony Oursler in nearby Soho Square. No. 60, home of Frith Street Gallery, is a recurring flashpoint for coincidence, as one discovers in Jaki Irvine’s six-part video installation Towards a Polar Sea, 2005. In the opener, the only segment in black-and-white, gallery director Jane Hamlyn recalls how a Craigie Horsfield

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  print December 2005

  Martin Herbert

  1 “AN ASIDE” (CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE, LONDON) Making a virtue of the ballooning art world’s deleterious impact on its own epistemology—i.e., no one can get a fix on the whole picture anymore—Tacita Dean’s superb curatorial venture foreswore holistic mastery in favor of a journey through the artist’s own cloud of unknowing. Chance meetings with art and artists (plus several Sebaldian coincidences) guided the collection of this daisy chain of works by, among others, Lothar Baumgarten, Paul Nash, Sharon Lockhart, Joseph Beuys, and Fischli & Weiss. An endeavor few “professional” curators would

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  diary October 10, 2005

  Eat to the Beat

  London

  I expect to be offered psychoactive drugs and scalped tickets outside a concert. But an apple? Then again, the Barbican Centre’s concert hall is used by classical musicians, and this is a Monday night Matthew Herbert gig—or, more specifically, a performance of the British electronica boffin’s recent eco-friendly platter, Plat du Jour. Someone has already pressed a complimentary copy of The Ecologist magazine into my hand, and the audience (gaunt metropolitan girls for whom the apple might be a little fattening and who say “dude” without a hint of irony, guys who work for hip-hop labels like

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  print October 2005

  Hurvin Anderson

  Anyone who has visited Trinidad and Tobago—as British-born, Jamaica-descended Hurvin Anderson did before commencing the series of paintings he’s produced over the past couple of years—knows about “liming.” This Caribbean colloquialism has two sides: It’s what locals are doing when languidly propping up the beachside rum bars; it’s what travel brochures say moneyed tourists are up to when firing tennis balls around at the islands’ country clubs. On the evidence of his paintings, Anderson finds lime-time tough. His eye twitchily takes in places that semaphore colonialism (Trinidad and Tobago gained

• previews September 2005

  Jonathan Monk

  Jonathan Monk loves first-generation Conceptualists like family: unconditionally and without compunction about teasing them for their foibles. The autobiographical tilt of the British artist’s output ensures its comic, critical impurity, whether in photographs taken on a car journey with his mother whenever she checked the route, wall texts inviting the viewer to dubious future assignations, or animations of both Sol LeWitt’s gouache cubes and a Rubik’s Cube. Monk’s first London retrospective will repurpose the ICA’s lower gallery as storage and its upper gallery as a